Rebecca Yarros is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than fifteen novels, with multiple starred Publishers Weekly reviews and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. A second-generation army brat, Rebecca loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to hers for more than twenty years. She's the mother of six children, and she and her family live in Colorado with their stubborn English bulldogs, two feisty chinchillas, and a cat named Artemis, who rules them all. Having fostered, then adopted their youngest daughter, Rebecca is passionate about helping children in the foster system through her nonprofit, One October, which she cofounded with her husband in 2019. To learn more about their mission, visit oneoctober.org. You can learn more about Rebecca's work at RebeccaYarros.com. You can find more of my reviews of Rebecca's work here.
Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky. Now the real training begins, and Violet's already wondering how she'll get through. It's not just that it's grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it's designed to stretch the riders' capacity for pain beyond endurance. It's the new vice commandant, who's made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is—unless she betrays the man she loves. Although Violet's body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else's, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules. But a determination to survive won't be enough this year. Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.
I will say that Yarros knows how to write an addicting book. While it took me 50 pages to get back into the story and into this world, Iron Flame is 600+ pages of straight adventure, and every time I put it down, I looked forward to the next time I could pick it up. I was hooked by needing to know what happened next, and now I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for the next book in the series because I'm so curious to see how our characters are going to get out of this one!
That being said, those first 50 pages are tough. Similar to some of my issues in book 1, Yarros really hits readers over the head with some details—they've never, ever been second years before, ever! Brennan looks different but the same but different but the same—and doesn't give us the details we really need to ground ourselves in Basgiath and Navarre. Rather, Yarros tends to contradict herself, and I questioned myself multiple times while reading because I'd read a phrase and think, didn't we just confirm that the opposite was true a few pages ago? I also found, throughout the book, most of the dialogue to be cringey and unrealistic—as in, this just isn't how people talk to each other! Iron Flame, and Fourth Wing before it, would have really benefitted from an extensive line edit.
Violet's and Xaden's interactions are the hardest to read in those first 50 pages, and indeed throughout the rest of the book. At one point near the end, Violet asks, "How are we still having the same fight five months later?" and I felt that exact same way every time they had scenes together. Violet and Xaden argued circles around one another, until I completely lost the thread of why Violet was mad with Xaden in the first place. Violet's and Xaden's interactions can be boiled down to two buckets: they're arguing with one another, or they're having sex. They literally don't do anything else, and it's super frustrating, because it means I don't believe in their chemistry at all.
What would have had me believing in their chemistry was getting to see more of Xaden's and Violet's letters on the page. Sure, we get a few snippets at the beginning of the chapters, along with some other interesting yet ultimately unforgettable excerpts, but it's not enough to feel like we as readers are getting the same insight into Xaden's mind as Violet is supposedly getting in those letters. Violet calls out at one point that the letters are so sweet to receive, and really help her get a better understanding of Xaden, and I find it frustrating and receive the same insight as a reader who is only getting Violet's first person POV. The only way that we experience Xaden's character is filtered through Violet's experience, and cutting off the key interactions the letters provides leaves Xaden underdeveloped as a character.
Speaking of character, we meet some interesting new ones in Iron Flame. Some are enemies, and some are friends, and some occupy that strange space in between. I was especially curious about the characterization of our new villains. The one I was most interested in wasn't on the page so much, which wasn't surprising and gives me high hopes for the next book. The return of Jack Barlowe was disappointing, especially because it had so much potential to be interesting but felt lacking overall. But Cat was the "villain" I felt had the most potential, and only delivered partway (which I think is more disappointing than how Jack Barlowe's character was handled). Cat and Violet fight over Xaden at the beginning, which is decidedly annoying, and honestly misogynistic. Every interaction they had would not have passed the Bechdel Test, and I thought we left 2014 behind you guys! To have two women fight over a man, and subsequently contribute significantly to Violet's view of herself, is just not what I want to be reading in a 2023 release. While some may argue that Cat was really fighting to retrieve power from Xaden's name, the rhetoric behind all of their interactions is not coded to consistently get that across, and could have been with an extensive line edit. Once Cat and Violet find a truce, their relationship is so interesting, and I wish it could have been expanded on—but of course, too much of the focus was on when they were squabbling over Xaden.
And continuing my theme of character—I'm so glad that there was more of Tairn and Andarna on the page! They are my favorites—I love their banter with Violet, and getting to watch Andarna grow up and get more of her backstory was so compelling. By far, the dragons are the best part of this book, but I honestly could have had even more with them. I hope with each book, we increase our dragon content a little bit more until book five is literally all dragons, all the time!
What I also find interesting is the way Yarros cuts scenes. I think she does a pretty good job at building tension by keeping chapters mostly short in length, and ending on cliffhangers. It keeps me wanting to flip the page and find out what happens next. However, Yarros doesn't do a great job at determining which scenes we'll see and which we don't. For example, there's a confrontation between Aaric and Xaden that happens that we don't get to see—a conversation that would have been filled with so much tension and could help readers better understand these two named characters (one of them a main character!), and Yarros cuts to post-confrontation and hardly summarizes it for us afterward. This happens several times, which is frustrating, because we don't get to actually see the tense conversations on page, and is a sign to me of weak writing. It's always telling when a writer doesn't dive into the harder scenes, and I think Yarros does this by hiding behind abrupt chapter/section endings.
There is much about Violet's character that didn't make sense to me this time around. After figuring out that they're being poisoned for RSC, Violet is able to save her squadmates the next time she detects poison—by smelling it. But then when presented with a cup from someone who, sure, she's trusted for years but who she also just found out brought her first year nemesis back to life, she drinks like she hadn't been poisoned or almost poisoned the same way twice before, and as if she hadn't spent majority of her first year poisoning other people! I was so frustrated by her in this moment that it led to me not trusting her—because the second what we're told about her character stops aligning with how she acts, I feel like I'm being cheated by the author. This continued as Violet was unable to articulate to Xaden over and over again why she's so frustrated with him, and when she says that she failed a history test, despite having "the mind of a scribe"? It's also interesting that her disability only seems to exist when she's pushing her body to the limit for battle or training related reasons—but not when Xaden is having rough sex with her. Too many inconsistencies in her character led me to not trust her as our narrator.
I especially can't trust her as a narrator because I never feel like she can give us a consistent description of her world. To be fair, I hardly had a grasp on Navarre and Basgiath while reading Fourth Wing, but this book tosses even more mythology, even more lore, even more history, onto an already-shaky foundation. There's more magic, but the descriptions of it hardly make sense. There's more history and geography, and while it's helpful to have a map on the endpapers, the city names don't mean much to us because there's no foundation to what the world is like or how it's distinct because Yarros didn't take the time to develop that in Fourth Wing.
Because there hasn't been an appropriate point yet in the review to mention it: did anyone else pick up on how Bodhi gave her a code to pass along to Xaden, but then she doesn't? I was actually surprised that Yarros was able to tie up some of the other loose ends (for example, why the dagger was able to help the squad escape the torture chambers) but this one really bothered me because it was revolution related, and Violet was so adamant about being included—there was her moment to pass along a message and be a player, and she doesn't take it? Correct me if I'm wrong here—drop page numbers in the comments if you caught it, but I really genuinely don't think this loose end was tied.
I think a lot of my issues come down to having so much happen in one book. Not that I wished this book to be slower, by any means, but I felt that the focus was always slightly off. As a reader, I wanted to focus more on reading letters between Xaden and Viole to build my belief in their chemistry and their relationship. As a reader, I wanted to focus in more on those classes where Yarros was trying to world build, so that I understand the stakes of battles and key moments better—as they stand, they muddied my understanding of the world, which proved frustrating because I was expected to "keep up" with Violet's "clever mind" as she figured things out that the reader is "clearly supposed to follow along with." I'm not saying anything less needed to happen in the book, but if the focus of each scene shifted and focused in on what was actually important in order to build a good story (through, perhaps, an extensive line edit), I would have enjoyed this second installment so much more.
If you have read through this whole review, first of all, congratulations you are nearing the end! Thank you for making it this far! You might be surprised by my next statement: I will be reading the third book in the series. I have to say, I think the ending of this book was incredibly interesting and compelling—much more than the end of Fourth Wing, which shocked me greatly when I read it. The end of Iron Flame leaves a lot of questions, and ones that I feel like can take the series anywhere, and I'm beyond curious to see where it goes. Like with Fourth Wing, I think I just have this many thoughts because I really expected the books to be better versions of themselves, and it's frustrating to read knowing that had it had more time in editing, it could have been. Regardless, the books only exist as they are, and if anything, I do love participating in the worldwide phenomenon—who knows if or when another book or book series is going to come along that's going to unite the entire book community again? I'll take it where I can get it.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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