New Adult Fantasy: The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Rating: 10/10

Dear Reader,

This novel is an interesting one. If you loved “Divergent” or “The Hunger Games” growing up, you’ll love this one. It elicited the same feeling of starting the rebellion. I also want to note that while this reminds me of the dystopian genre, it is definitely an adult novel.

One thing I loved about reading this is the tension between Violet and the two possible love interests, Dain and Xaden. The tension she shares with both of them makes it hard to know who to root for, but eventually everyone picks a side. In my opinion, it wasn’t a hard choice.

Another layer to this story is the backstory of Brennan, Violet’s older brother. I wish they used the Book of Brennan more throughout the novel, but the author phases it out pretty early on. Brennan’s story is what makes it hard to root for Xaden, Brennan’s death really.

The layers in the backstory alone is well done, but I did hope for some more explanations. For example, Violet alludes to a rather painful or difficult life, but we get almost no details on what was so painful about it. She makes these little comments about how she’s always in pain and that her life was filled with hurt, but never tells us how or why and I think it’s part of her character that we need to understand to better understand her.

Finally, the pacing. I loved the pacing of this novel. Sometimes we skipped months in a page, other times we went several chapters on a handful of days. All we got were the scenes we needed for the story to be told, no more and no less.

Something I can applaud this story for is constantly keeping me on my toes. I never feel like I know what’s going to happen, but not in that annoying no foreshadowing way. This novel has an interesting flow where I can suspect some plot points but the rest are surprises.

-Grace Sofia