Fourth Wing (The Empyrean #1)

So I finished The Lord of The Rings and that made me think that maybe fantasy isn’t that bad, maybe I could still find the joy I had as a child reading Eragon. Except, I don’t want to read Eragon as an adult because I’m pretty sure that would ruin the childhood memory I have of it if any modern day reviews of it are anything to go by. So here’s Fourth Wing, a young adult fantasy story taking place in the epic saga of The Empyrean (I guess that’s “The Empire” but quirky?) about a girl who is not like the other girls and she’s a badass and she’s going to be in love and kick ass and have a cool dragon and…yeah based on everything I would usually stand for that has to be one of the worst pitches for me. It has no hope of having the world development of Tolkien and can only end up as a generic and forgettable fantasy world, it is bound to have a level of teen angst and teen horniness which I strongly dislike and when the moment I bought it I saw The Sun (of all journals that it could have been) review it as “Pure escapism, think Fifty Shades meets Hunger Games”, I really thought I was going to read something so desperately awful that I would never finish this one. Instead I learnt something quite unexpected: none of these points prevent a book from being fun.

Getting the negative out of the way first though, there is a definite a level of teen angst that is grating. Dragon riders are “the cool ones” in a very similar way to how “dauntless” were the cool ones in Divergent. At least here they have a reason to exist. The whole set up is very Divergent inspire which shouldn’t necessarily be a negative but well Divergent isn’t a good book. Different social classes living mostly isolated from each other and each with a very specific niche they fill in society and we even get the whole “the cool ones dress in black and the smart ones dress in grey” thing which is a bit too childish and cartoony. The book is also horny, it starts off mildly annoying and out of place with Violet fighting for her life, whilst simultaneously commenting how she “really doesn’t mind all these shirtless men” around her. However, it eventually tips over the embrace the young adult level of sex with entire chapters dedicating to just her fucking someone. It’s extraordinarily boring because baring one neat detail of world building about there being a commonly used male contraceptive pill, it really just is 20 odd pages of fucks, cocks, engorging, thrusting and cumming which…eh. What is particularly frustrating though is that once Violet had her sex, that’s all she can think about moving forward, every second sentence is dedicated to Violet describing how attractive Xander is and how she wants nothing but to suck him off again or whatever colourful description the author could come up with. It detracts from what should be the peak of narrative tension and if it weren’t for Violet’s obsession with sex, there is a fairly grim and interesting story being told here.

The dragon rider training is meant to be ruthless, it almost encourages students to try to murder each other and even without student involvement, most training steps result in dozens of deaths. It’s a dark story and it’s also one that quickly suggests that something fishy is going on. There’s a totalitarian militaristic fanaticism feeling to the entire set up and it isn’t subtly written (as I’ll cover a bit further down, the author’s writing skill isn’t great) but it’s there and it’s interesting and it makes learning more about this world all the more entertaining. Aspiring dragon riders volunteer for the dragon rider school despite its high death rate because all they want to do is fight for their country which is supposedly engaged in a defensive war against a nation of griffin riders. I’ll admit it to be arbitrary but I have never seen griffins to be the creatures of evil and so I was primed to expect the dragon rider nation to be the bad guys just based on that assumption. It was however not helped by the dragon riders encouraging their most bloodthirsty and cruel students to rise in ranks, that they all dress in edgy black, and by how logistically there simply was no way for dragon riders to be losing this supposed defensive war.

The magic system of this universe is under baked to put it mildly. Every dragon rider gets a random magic ability from their link to their dragon. These abilities range from the expected fire and ice wielding to completely out of left field powers like being able to see the outcome of battles (not the future generally mind you, just the future of battles). There are apparently rarity tiers to these powers as no power is ever described as “never seen before”, just very rare at best but we never see any rider have the same powers so even though ice wielding is meant to be a common one, we only see it being used once. The following problem is that the book should have to answer to the question: how do you lose a war when your army marshal can see the outcome of battles? The author hand waves it away explaining that he can only see the outcome of battles that he knows are coming but really unless your nation is running the worst secret operations service in existence (which isn’t possible because they have a guy who can read minds through touch), surprise attacks should be the exception not the norm. Making this worse is that dragons get the bonus of empowering a McGuffin that negates non dragon magic so griffin riders are essentially just regular soldiers riding slightly larger birds without any magic. How would someone capable of incinerating an entire forest with a flick of his wrist ever lose against a big bird?

Problematically when the penny drops and Violet finally figures it out for herself that her nation has been lying to everyone even erasing inconvenient History to make for better propaganda, we still have no explanation as to how dragons and griffins could ever be in a stalemate. There is the reveal of a third nation of evil wizards (can’t really make it sound any more special because that’s how generic it is) that is slowly but surely killing off the griffin rider nation, however their magic is also negated by the dragon McGuffin. There is something happening in the background with some McGuffins showing signs of weakening but that is a recent event and as such, nothing would have stopped the dragons from taking over the world in the past few centuries. Maybe there will be more to it than that, I’d be willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt as there are sequels, but the writing style set off several alarms off that would suggest to me that they simply didn’t really think about it that much.

Exposition, when it is given, is never naturally told. At best Violet happens to have been thrown into a classroom and gets told about the world because she’s there to learn. At worst, the story just stops and we get a couple of paragraphs dedicated to explaining the backstory of whatever is being discussed. Conveniently for the author, whenever Violet is facing a significant challenge she calms herself down by reciting the History of her world which is not a particularly subtle way of squeezing in some extra world building. There’s also a lack of consistency to the world building as dragons are meant to be sacrosanct to this society, yet Jack, the cliché rival to Violet who is fully indoctrinated into the dragon rider propaganda is then written as so evil that he decides to kill a dragon which makes no sense, it’s like a pundit deciding to kill a cow. Adding to this, vocabulary is a major problem and that’s where we get back into my strife with the young adult genre. The world the story takes place in is as generically as I can put it a medieval high fantasy one yet based on how characters speak that is simply not the case. From very odd sentences like “I grabbed him by the balls and now with my knife next to his balls he was really scared I was gonna go for his balls” (when just mentioning once that she had her knife to his groin would have been just as effective and less weird) to characters saying that they are “operating on vibes”, all characters are 21st century teenagers acting in this medieval fantasy world, not people who have lived in it. This then affects characterisation as when Violet takes her first life instead of struggling through it like a regular person, she does so by oozing teenage edginess. We’re not quite done yet, an issue that I am aware I have when writing but that a professional author and their editor should have been able to avoid is the repetition of canned sentences within 2 pages of each other. When Violet finally gets her dragon she “climbs faster than we ever climbed before” twice in the same scene and a bit later “banks left, following the curve of the mountain” twice in the same paragraph, it’s just shoddy writing. Finally, something has to be said about how the author writes character deaths. There are many deaths in this book; I’m undecided whether it is to ground the story or if it is to support the teenage angst; and they almost all lack impact. The author seems to have taken death as being something brutal and extraordinarily abrupt. That’s a fair take, the sudden loss of a character can be impactful but that requires attachment to the character so their loss is immediately felt. Problematically, most characters who aren’t named Violet, Dain, Xander, Liam or Ashley have no real personality and so we’re only losing a name on the page, not a person. The book does succeed once at being impactful by pulling an unexpected double death after the peak of chaos from the first death is resolved but otherwise, deaths are handled like punctuation which is quite the wasted potential. This decision also robs from satisfying story arc resolutions as Jack’s death is overshadowed by Violet discovering her lightning wielding power and he’s essentially killed “off-screen” which is plain awful for a conflict that has been built up for over 75% of the book. To finish off some notes regarding the audiobook; there’s also a couple of chapters written from Xander’s perspective (which honestly feel like an after thought given that they’re crammed at the end of the book) and the author seemingly put no effort into them as Xander’s way of thinking and narrating is identical to Violet’s and if it weren’t for the change in voice actor in the audiobook I might not even have noticed the change of narrator. The voice actors both for the Violet chapters and the…3 Xander chapters are passable at best. Xander’s voice actor is doing his best “slightly out of breath from being horny” voice which doesn’t work when he’s talking about Violet almost dying and Violet’s voice actress is…fine? She does a perfect bratty edgy teenager sounding a bit too young for Violet really and she cannot read action scenes to save her life but it’s serviceable.

And yet, despite these 6 paragraphs of negativity, there is one truth that imposes itself to me: the book is fun. Violet using her wits to poison her opponents to win her fights is fun, as unsubtle as they are, discussions about griffin and dragon combat tactics are fun and dragon dialogue is hilarious. It is a real turning point when Violet bonds to her dragons as the dragon flavoured deadpanned sarcasm delivers some much needed humour. And I’ll say it: the love triangle is pretty good. I usually hate love triangles because I’m used to Twilight or Hunger Games which use theirs as an excuse to have 2 men fawn over the female lead who is constantly hesitating who she should go with. This isn’t the case here, Dain is fairly quickly characterised as an overprotective and yet traitorous character whilst Xander becomes the obvious “enemies to lovers” character and it works, Xander and Violet are good together; they are way too sex crazed but they’ve also got moments of just being a decent couple. This is a really odd one because I cannot say much else about the book, it is not well written and it is riddled with flaws, a lot of which it inherits from being young adult slop and yet there’s something almost nostalgic about it and I know teenager me who enjoyed Eragon would also have been all over this. So it’s not a book I’d recommend based on its qualities alone but for me it was a good time and as I said in the beginning I did learn something from it: fantasy doesn’t have to be as good as Tolkien and it doesn’t even have to be good, sometimes being fun is good enough.