Iron Flame (The Empyrean #2)

Despite it being so recent, I had to go and read my review of the first book again just to check how my feelings evolved. Interestingly a lot of stuff that I had predicted checked out and some of my mistakes ironically support my point on the genericness and poor writing quality of these books. Xander whom I refer to in the first review isn’t a character, it was Xaden all along but neither is a real name, they’re just variations of the same edgy love interest name for generic fantasy books. I also forgot who Ashley was despite me listing her as a character with personality which is very ironic so let’s just say I was talking about Rhiannon or Imogen. It turned out that Jack had a reason to go out of his way to kill Andarna as he already was a venin in disguise at the time and that’s a nice surprise, that it wasn’t just “oh the bad guy is very very bad so he kills dragons”. Why the McGuffin wards were weakening though still remains unanswered, I mean in this one they fail but that’s because Venin Jack bleeds his dragon on top of the stone to extinguish its fire, that’s not really a progressive failure. With those points addressed though we can start fresh and look at Iron Flame as a new book with the author surely having learnt and grown from her experience writing the first book.

Unfortunately, it really is just more of the same, I have a very long list of comments I made complaining about the writing style and the world building, and I will go through them if only so I remember them in the future but there’s little I can add, they are the same issues. I wouldn’t necessarily say that these issues are worse than they were in the first one, they are just compounding one another, the world building is not any worse than before, but the more detail is added to it the worse the overall world becomes, same with the writing style. Straight out the gate, in the first 10 pages, we learn that Navarre is somehow conservative when it comes to military technology as they never figured to try out dragon scales for armour. If there is one thing that fascist militaristic states are good at, it’s progressing military technology so why is Navarre not doing that? Maybe it’s because Yarros doesn’t actually know whether dragon scales are impenetrable or not, Violet’s dragon scale corset has saved her repeatedly from getting stabbed but in the second half of the book a dragon gets shot by dozens of arrows that easily pierce his scales so which one is it? I don’t know and I think the author forgot. One of Navarre’s military officers also decides that Violet and Xaden need to be punished because he doesn’t like them (yeah that’s the reasoning) so he separates them which causes their dragons a lot of anguish (because they’re mated and all that). Xaden is openly described as one the most powerful dragon riders that Navarre could have wished for and Violet bound 2 dragons instead of 1, one of which is the second most powerful black dragon in the world. Navarre is a militaristic nation that is fully ok with one of the officers crippling its 2 biggest military assets for a hissy fit.

Whilst we are on Violet getting punished, it was a neat trait in the first book that she was disabled having brittle bones and having to be extra careful about not hurting herself. The first book already had a bit of an issue with her essentially “pushing through the pain” without ever any consequence but it does become worse here where she gets thrown against a wall and only comes away with a mild bump on her head and does acrobatics on dragon wings without consequence despite it previously having been established that said acrobatics would break all her joints. Her condition has become flavour and nothing more and that’s disappointing. Violet generally doesn’t come out well in this one, she is meant to be this scribe trained to become a dragon rider who always knows everything and is really smart and yada yada yada but she’s really dumb in this one…? She risks the existence of the entire rebellion movement and the fate of the continent because “lying to my sister is like really hard maaaan”, she doesn’t guess that the guy who hates her guts and keeps her separated from Xaden is going to try to kill her in the exam that involves her getting tortured (don’t worry we’re getting to that later), and when it is revealed that Xaden was engaged to another woman who happens to be the daughter of the king of a neighbouring rival nation she doesn’t go for the obvious “ah this was a diplomatic marriage of convenience”, she goes for “how could you ever be engaged to another woman you horrible horrible man”.

Let’s get the other woman out of the way because she is by far the worst part of this book. Other woman or Cat for short used to be engaged to Xaden but he broke it off and now she’s angry and mad at Violet for stealing her man and her potential at becoming a queen. So every time both Cat and Violet are in the same scene the entire narration warps around describing how they both immaturely fight like 12 year olds over the high school hot boy. It’s partially explained by Cat having the power of amplifying emotion so what is mild anger and jealousy in Violet becomes all consuming for her but Cat herself is the problem, she simply doesn’t behave like an adult. It comes down to them arguing about who gave Xaden the better cumming experience, it’s pathetic, juvenile and again not written like a medieval fantasy piece but like 2 Tik Tokers arguing. Cat’s power is also a massive question mark in terms of world building and what the author understands as powerful magic…or even what the author understands as power…I guess? Cat’s power of emotion amplification is described as very powerful because it’s difficult to defend against and on paper I could see it, having your opponent be so angry at you that they struggle to control their actions and throw themself into combat without thought definitely could be a positive to gain the upper hand. The problem is when she does that against Violet she loses so hard that Violet is about to kill her and she still refuses to let her power go and the only reason Violet doesn’t kill her is because Xaden steps in and carries Violet away. Cat has a power that apparently literally makes people more likely to kill her, what great magic! She even uses her magic to cause fights between riders and fliers and everyone knows it but nothing is done about it, they’re adults fighting a war, why is she not getting court-martialled?

What makes this magic power worse is that it’s an excuse for Violet to feel jealousy and insufficient for Xaden. Fundamentally, that’s fine but Violet spends entire chapters being an edgy, moronic wannabe teenager with the emotional maturity of a 3 year old who laughs when he sees a stick and cries when he throws the stick away, she does not need an excuse to be an idiot and yet here it is. Let’s go back to a couple other examples of Violet being stupid because there is one chapter where I had to leave the comment “I’m going to stop highlighting parts where Violet is an idiot because there’s too many”. Violet for some reason develops a guilt complex and behaves the unbearable cliché of “everything is my fault and so I must hate the world” which also doesn’t help in showcasing her complete lack of emotional maturity. However, when someone feels so guilty, they should be looking for ways to better themselves to alleviate the guilt, one massive gap in Violet’s skill set is that she has no control nor understanding of her magic. She can make lightning happen and yet she never questions it, she never asks how it works, if there’s any other ways she can use it, whether she can control it better, no this is all told to her in a single chapter and her reaction is not “screw the dragon rider school for not telling me before”, it’s not “oh wow so much potential”, it’s not “damn that’s going to be a lot to learn”, it’s “screw you dude, my power is awesome and I don’t need nobody to tell me how to use it”. It culminates at the teacher telling her “here do this homework for next time and we can get started on training you properly” and her responding “yeah but what if I don’t”. Violet is 21, not 12 and certainly not 3, why did Yarros make her the most unbearable entitled piece of garbage I do not know, she is unredeemably stupid and childish, there is no saving grace for her.

Whilst not quite as bad, the lack of maturity also extends to Xaden. He is caught in the middle of the Cat and Violet childish fight but he does admirably stay away from it somehow. However, the way he interacts with Violet is a bit disappointing. The main drama between Violet and Xaden revolves around this issue of Xaden having hidden the rebellion from Violet and having lied to her and Violet understandably for once struggles with trusting him. Xaden doesn’t improve his situation by giving non-answers to “can you promise to tell me the truth from now on?” and stands by an odd concept of “I’ll tell the truth to any questions you ask but I won’t tell you the truth outright”. Violet refuses to humour him on that which I can kind of get but also gets boring after 500 pages, at that point someone needs to give in or just break it off and Xaden blames Violet for “not asking the right questions”. It’s immature, it’s also a highly convoluted and boring lack of communication problem. It’s weirdly not as annoying as it usually would be for me because the characters basically never talk anyway, they thirst for each other’s bodies, they have the Young Adult sex that the genre requires and that’s the extent of their love for one another so nothing gained but nothing lost really either.

It turns out that the reason Xaden is so cagey is because he has a secondary power of being able to read minds which is a death sentence in Navarre. He also admits having read Violet’s thoughts before he was in love with her and this allows me to segue into the problem of Dain. Dain can also read minds but only through physical contact so that’s ok by Navarre law (I don’t make the rules). He also read Violet’s mind and told what he saw to his father who then decided to try to get Violet, Xaden, and all other rebels killed. Dain didn’t know that his father would do that but Violet doesn’t know that he didn’t know and so blames him for the first half of the book for Liam’s death. It’s an interesting conundrum if I have to be honest and I don’t know for sure where I stand on it but I feel like both Dain and Xaden regardless of circumstances did something akin to rape and that should never be forgiven. It doesn’t really matter that Dain didn’t know the consequences of his actions, it doesn’t matter that Xaden wasn’t in love with Violet yet, reading someone’s mind without their consent is such a dramatic violation of privacy that I cannot find it in me to forgive either of them for it. Violet says as much to Dain, that she can move past his violation but cannot forgive him in full but then applies a double standard where she is very ok with forgiving Xaden so it’s weird and I again don’t think the author really thought that far about the moral implications of mind reading. On the plus side, I was expecting the reveal of Dain not being a bad guy and then Violet agonising about whether she wants to be with Xaden or be with Dain but that never happens and I’ll give the book a bonus point for not falling into that YA trap. She did have an “and everyone clapped” moment though when Violet like totally epically burnt Cat though so fuck it remove the bonus point.

To get the character specific chapters done, it’s finally time to talk about Varrish, also known as the guy who hates Violet’s guts and wants to torture her to death. Varrish is not a good character, he is a Dolores Umbridge, a Nazi, a no nuance villain. It would be fine if he weren’t such a prominent character, he is so basally evil that there’s no surprise to anything he does, if you think “a Nazi would do that” then he does it, it almost turns boring when he shows up…The major issue that he introduces however is that he really highlights the scuffed job Yarros did with the dragon world building. The issue was already present in the first book, dragons are supposedly intelligent beings with their own culture and government but interactions with them are based on animal rules (like don’t look the dog in the eyes or he might take it wrong). They also form profound bonds with their riders and would do anything to keep them alive but then they’re also ok with randomly incinerating a bunch of riders in training and happily engage in the 80% death rate exercises of rider school, killing each other’s riders without a second thought, it doesn’t make any sense but I could ignore it then because once out of first year I had the hope that I would not need to be subjected to the issue anymore. Unfortunately, I was wrong and it’s much harder to ignore this time around. Varrish tries to impose punishments on Violet that would effectively kill her for no other reason than he doesn’t like her. Violet’s dragon’s life depends on Violet staying alive so he has no reason to let that happen. Varrish (and Yarros by extension) justify Violet going through that punishment through an incredibly shaky argument of “Dragons don’t listen to humans but riders do”…except by ordering the rider around Varrish is de facto ordering the dragon around. So the basal logic here doesn’t check out and eventually Violet’s dragon had enough, straight up goes for the murder of Varrish’s dragon and forces Varrish to back out and behave decently. The problem is this has always been a possibility. Humans do not hold anything over dragons. Dragons empower the wards that keep humans safe, dragons are more powerful than humans, dragons are the reason humans get to have magic, dragons volunteer when it comes to having a rider, if dragons didn’t want to riders anymore then that would be it, dragons hold all the cards, in the coughing baby vs thermonuclear warhead duel, the dragons are the bomb. There is no possibility for an equal footing between the two. If a rider doesn’t want to obey and the dragon doesn’t want to obey then there is absolutely nothing the chain of command can do, it only holds together because Yarros wrote it that way. Varrish risked a catastrophic diplomatic incident because he didn’t like Violet, it’s a degree of stupidity that…well…is honestly quite par for the course given the other characters intelligence but that doesn’t make it good. Whilst we’re on another intelligence comment, Varrish brings Dain around to torture Violet and have him look through her mind, let’s remember that Dain’s power is top secret and that using it for a personal feud would probably qualify Varrish for execution.

This torture scene is also what I called the make or break moment for the author’s writing skill. The Red Rising saga has a character go through long term torture and this deeply affects them, struggling to build themselves back up and falling prey to panic attacks and full breakdowns when faced with any possibility of being locked away or facing their torturer again. I wanted that for Violet, not because I wanted her to suffer for her incompetence (or maybe a little bit) but because I wanted her to have that pivotal moment in her character growth, but instead once more it became flavour, just like her disability. There are a couple off-hand comments about her feeling mildly uncomfortable when going back to dragon rider school but she otherwise doesn’t have any long lasting effects nor trauma from it, she even offers to go get kidnapped by some rich king “if it helps save her family” which is brave and all but also not something anyone would say just 2 bloody days after having been kidnapped and tortured almost to death.

This lack of impact is something that I would usually count as a flaw of the YA genre but in this case I’m a bit more inclined to blame the author because there’s just too many other instances of failing to grasp the importance of things. The infantry quadrant is formerly introduced in this one and their training is apparently also quite lethal which really makes me question how a militarist nation like Navarre can possibly operate and sustain an active army. It’s like the author watched Starship Troopers, thought “hey I like this concept of sending kids in the meat grinder” except they missed the part where the kids are actually sent to the meat grinder and don’t have their numbers culled by 80% before getting into action. Making it even weirder is that war itself causes less death than the fucking training everyone has to go through. Yarros somehow expects the reader to feel gutted that…TWO dragon riders died during a battle on the border. On an average day a dozen cadets get killed at school so two deaths in a day in an active war is nothing. Even if you were to consider dragons to be tanks, losing two tanks in a day of war is business as usual. It really hurts the story when in the final chapters, everyone is making a final stand facing the enormous force of…500? ok then 500 (so a small skirmish in real war terms) wyvern and maybe 100 venin at a stretch. Facing that devastating army…one singular named character dies and it’s Violet’s mom who has had maybe 3 pages dedicated to her. Everyone else is alive (and when I say everyone, I do mean it because there’s not even the mention of unnamed character deaths), there’s some injuries (Sawyer lost a leg that’s not great I guess) but that’s just not how war works and it’s booooring when nothing has any impact. The voice actress is narrating this like it’s Violet’s fight of her life when she probably was safer fighting the venin than she was at school which involves surviving actual fucking torture as an exam. Violet’s mother didn’t even die in combat, she died to revive the McGuffin stone, the 500 wyvern and venin killed nobody in hours of combat.

This all goes back to an issue that was in the first book as well: Yarros doesn’t know how to write death. Plot armour is heavy in this one and that would be fine if it weren’t so painfully obvious. Most characters only are given a name for most of the book, then 1 page before their death they’ll get a full paragraph of characterisation like Visia mentioning her family on the border and how she wants to fly over to convince them to escape and how her relationship with them is difficult but it’s worth fighting for them and she’s dead or Lucella who talks about her baking skills and how she’s excited to make everyone a cake, a recipe she got from her mother and she’s dead. It’s very predictable and predictability is both the book’s biggest flaw and asset. I have repeatedly written predictions in my comments as I saw things that seemed like such obvious setups that I just wanted a record of how often I was right and how often the book would subvert my expectations. It surprised me once and that was with the Dain love triangle not happening, every other prediction I made was correct. Don’t drink the water you’re given right after you got kidnapped it’s probably poisoned and it was oh no how could nobody see that coming. Don’t trust the man who’s been shifty all year, if he gives you a snack it’s probably poisoned oh no it was how could Violet not expect this. This dream is weirdly lifelike and it references real events that took place and involves real characters and it all feels very foreboding, what’s that it was a vision that the enemy sent, how could neither Violet nor Xaden ever question that. You were split in two groups of opposite opinions and you’re tasked to work together with 2 maps and you didn’t compare the maps at the start oh wow who could have seen that the maps were different. I’d say I felt smart for seeing it all play out in advance but it’s really just too poorly and too obviously written. There is a comfort in moving through all these familiar set ups which is why I can call it something of an asset but it’s also just not very good at all.

To top it all off, we still got 21st century teenagers talking in whatever way is cool and edgy and do not remotely give the impression of living in a medieval fantasy world. Almost everyone knows sign language which…is weird because either everyone really knows it and it’s just a thing and that’s fine or it’s more like our world where most people don’t but instead here it’s the opposite where the minority only doesn’t know it and I don’t know, just feels like very awkward inclusion; I think having a deaf character in and characters being more inclined to learn sign language would have been a better example of inclusion than just everyone knowing it just because despite having literally only 1 deaf character in the entire book. We still got canned sentences, Violet’s dragon flew “faster than ever before” around 8 times by now if we count the first book as well, so he’s just getting faster and faster I guess? There’s some weird sentence logic like “The griffin who walks by the dragon’s side, they’re the only two light enough to walk on the snow” like dragons and griffins are lighter than humans now. Finally, this time I read the last chapter myself and I indeed just as I predicted in the review of the first book did not notice that it was narrating from Xaden’s point of view because I didn’t have the voice actor to tell me and I actually had to read it twice because from the style it is impossible to distinguish Violet from Xaden because the author doesn’t know how to adapt her writing style and reasoning style and just basic personality to different characters.

And yet, it’s still somehow fun. I honestly do not understand it, I think I just really like dragons and romance and maybe I do have a soft spot for YA garbage if it amalgamates into “delicious garbage”. From a pure writing skill perspective it’s maybe a 3/10 at a stretch, it’s really that bad and I can’t fault anyone on Goodreads who gives it a 1/5 or even a 0/5, it is most definitely trash. But it’s such fun trash that I am also most definitely coming back for that third book after a little palate cleansing with one or two other books.