Fourth Wing review: the desire to be believed in

There is a particular loneliness in having other people decide what you can survive. Their concern may be sincere. Their assessment may even identify a real danger. Yet every conversation leaves you defending the possibility of a life they have already ruled out.

Rebecca Yarros builds Fourth Wing around that pressure. Violet Sorrengail enters a military college where physical vulnerability can become a death sentence, carrying the education of a would-be scribe into a system that values riders. The dragons supply the spectacle. The more intimate fantasy is finding someone who sees her limitations without making those limitations the whole of her.

Our verdict: Fourth Wing has a compelling emotional engine and an unusually effective combination of danger, desire, and the pleasure of discovering competence. Its romantic promise is stronger when it concerns respect than when it relies on attraction alone. The story would gain depth from more room for ordinary relationships, a more convincing institutional logic, and a slower reckoning with the secrets exposed near the end.

What to know before reading Fourth Wing

First published on May 2, 2023, Fourth Wing begins the Empyrean series. Violet is twenty, and her commanding mother sends her into the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College despite her preparation for a different future. Xaden Riorson, a powerful senior rider with reasons to resent her family, becomes her central romantic counterpart. Rebecca Yarros's book page identifies it as fantasy romance; Kirkus confirms the original release date.

This is adult romantasy, with explicit sexual scenes and strong language. The author's content guidance includes brutal injuries, death, poisoning, blood, and intense violence. The academy setting should not be mistaken for a YA classification.

Full spoilers ahead: this review discusses Violet's dragon bonds, the changing basis of her relationship with Xaden, a major death, the final revelation about her brother, and the first book's unresolved conflict. It does not reveal the plots of the sequels.

Violet's body gives the opening a tangible cost

The authorized opening shows Violet exhausted by the stairs before she reaches the much more dangerous test ahead. Her sister Mira challenges their mother's decision. Violet has trained, but training has not made her body interchangeable with those of the other candidates. Hachette's official extract establishes the conflict through exertion and family argument rather than a distant explanation.

That is a strong choice. An entrance examination becomes more than a demonstration of courage when the person facing it must also calculate what her body can do. The danger is immediate, but so is the humiliation of being discussed as a problem in a room where everyone else has more authority.

Our admiration begins with that specificity. A generic underdog needs to prove people wrong. Violet also needs to understand when to adapt, when to ask for help, and when an apparently neutral standard is built around someone else's body. Those questions make competence more interesting than toughness.

The novel's most persuasive promise is that intelligence can change the terms of survival. It gives the heroine something she brought with her from the life she was supposed to leave behind. Her previous education can have value even in a world that initially treats it as evidence that she belongs elsewhere.

The academy makes urgency easy, but credibility harder

Basgiath creates an efficient narrative problem: Violet cannot simply avoid the people who threaten her. She must train alongside them. There are fewer dragons willing to bond than candidates hoping to ride, so competition becomes a matter of survival. The author's synopsis makes that lethal scarcity central to the setup.

As a reading experience, it is an effective source of forward motion. A lesson can become a threat. A potential ally can matter before the friendship has had time to grow. Small decisions carry more weight because the space for a harmless mistake is so narrow.

As a military institution, it raises questions the spectacle cannot entirely answer. A force facing external danger has reasons to preserve talent. A college that allows candidates to destroy one another needs a persuasive account of what it gains and what it wastes. Cruelty can be part of the story's argument; it still benefits from a logic beyond making each chapter dangerous.

This is where critical responses separate. Publishers Weekly's starred review praises the balance of worldbuilding and momentum. Kirkus finds the setting and character development less convincing, while recognizing the book's fast movement. Those reactions describe a real tradeoff: the same compression that makes the story easy to enter can make its foundations feel thin.

Our reservation is not that the academy should become kind. A few more glimpses of its incentives, disagreements, and failures would make its brutality more revealing. Then Violet's resistance would challenge an institution we understand, rather than only a sequence of dangerous requirements.

Dragons give the fantasy a relationship beyond the romance

Violet bonds with both Tairn and Andarna, an exceptional outcome that changes her standing. SparkNotes' account of the bonding chapters documents the two bonds and the different circumstances attached to them.

This gives the book a valuable emotional dimension. A dragon's acceptance can offer a form of recognition that the college has withheld. Violet is no longer only the candidate everyone assesses. She participates in relationships whose significance exceeds the institution's initial expectations.

The danger is that exceptional selection can do too much of the work. Being chosen is thrilling; developing judgment afterward is what gives that choice durability. A heroine becomes more persuasive when her new advantages introduce responsibilities and limits alongside prestige.

That is why the distinction between power and competence matters here. Power changes what Violet can attempt. Competence concerns the decisions she makes with it. The book is most interesting when those two things do not arrive together, and she must learn how to inhabit a possibility she could barely have imagined at the start.

Xaden's appeal depends on respect becoming visible

The family history makes Xaden an efficient source of romantic tension. Violet has reasons to fear him before she has enough knowledge to interpret him. Desire then complicates a judgment that initially seems straightforward.

But an enemies-to-lovers premise has to do more than turn fear into attraction. It needs to change what the characters know about each other. Otherwise, hostility is a decorative obstacle, cleared once the love interest becomes sufficiently desirable.

Violet's relationship with Dain provides a useful comparison. Kirkus criticizes his repeated undermining of her abilities. Concern becomes emotionally restrictive when it leaves someone no room to demonstrate what she can do. In that context, Xaden's willingness to take Violet seriously has more force than another description of his physical appeal.

The romantic distinction is the difference between keeping someone safe by reducing her choices and helping her make a dangerous choice more intelligently. Readers can respond intensely to that distinction because recognition is intimate. Being desired is gratifying. Being believed in can reach a more vulnerable part of a person.

Our hesitation concerns how much of the relationship is established beyond that contrast. John Sooja's Common Sense Media review questions whether the shift from physical attraction to love receives enough development. We share the underlying concern: urgency can explain why two people come together without proving why they could remain together.

More disagreement that both characters can afford to finish would help. So would quieter evidence of interest in the other's judgments and habits. Such scenes would reduce the pace slightly, but give the eventual declarations something more particular to stand on.

Why the ending hurts, and why its secrets matter

The closing battle brings the death of Liam, Violet's friend and protector. Violet survives poisoning, then discovers that Brennan, the brother she believed dead, is alive. Xaden's concealed allegiances also force her to reconsider his honesty. SparkNotes' account of the final chapters verifies these events.

The juxtaposition is powerful: grief arrives beside an impossible reunion. Survival cannot restore Violet's earlier understanding of her life. The people she trusts and the history she has inherited now require different judgments.

Our strongest reservation is about space. The ending creates several emotional obligations at once: mourning, relief, distrust, and commitment to a changed future. A rapid succession of revelations makes an excellent invitation to another volume, but gives each consequence less room to settle here.

The distinction between an explanation and a repair is especially important for the romance. A defensible reason for secrecy can clarify Xaden's position without resolving Violet's experience of being excluded. The sequel inherits that tension. Book one earns interest in what comes next more convincingly than it earns complete confidence in the relationship as it stands.

What would make Fourth Wing stronger?

We would preserve the opening's bodily specificity and let it govern more of the story's choices. Adaptation should remain part of Violet's competence, including after her power grows. That would keep the emotional argument coherent: value does not depend on becoming indistinguishable from the people who underestimated her.

We would also develop a few supporting characters through desires that do not primarily concern Violet. The more independent a friend feels before a crisis, the more a loss changes the world beyond the heroine's immediate pain. This would cost a little narrative speed and give the danger a wider human meaning.

For the romance, our preferred revision is modest: more evidence of trust under conditions where attraction cannot do the persuading. Let a disagreement remain uncomfortable. Let each character accept a limit the other sets. Those moments would make respect observable, rather than leaving it mostly inside the appeal of the pairing.

Finally, we would give the conclusion a longer emotional landing. The cliffhanger can remain. A little more space around its consequences would help the first novel feel like an experience with weight of its own, even as it opens the next one.

Empyrean reading order and standalone suitability

The opening sequence is Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, then Onyx Storm, as listed on Yarros's official book page. Read in that order: later installments continue the characters and conflicts established here. Fourth Wing is not a standalone romance with every major emotional question resolved.

We would not name a best book in the entire series on the basis of this first-volume research. What this review can identify is the first book's particular strength: the compressed exhilaration of a heroine finding new possibilities while surrounded by people who doubt her. Its particular weakness is the amount of emotional and political work it postpones while creating that rush.

Who should read Fourth Wing?

Try it if you want dangerous training, dragon bonds, adult romantic intensity, and a heroine whose intellect matters to her survival. Its appeal is especially clear if you enjoy stories where being underestimated becomes the starting point for finding a different kind of strength.

You may struggle with it if you need a carefully demonstrated institutional logic, extensive supporting-character development, or a romance whose progression leaves plenty of room for ordinary conversation. A strong appetite for action does not make those concerns disappear; it changes how much they interrupt your enjoyment.

The book's emotional invitation remains compelling. Violet is asked to survive a place that doubts her, and to decide whom she can believe when recognition finally arrives. That is enough to make the fantasy matter. Asking more of the relationships and the world is a way of taking that promise seriously.

Compare its romantic dynamics with our A Court of Thorns and Roses review. For intimacy built in a very different setting, read our Funny Story analysis. Our feature on earned romantic tension explores why attraction alone sometimes leaves us unconvinced.

Looking for another world to get lost in? Explore HoneyBooks romance audiobooks. Our catalog features different stories; this review does not imply that Fourth Wing is available on HoneyBooks.

Sources and editorial basis

This is original, research-based criticism informed by the authorized opening extract, author information, and the independent reviews linked above. SparkNotes supplies verification of specified later plot events. We have not claimed a complete firsthand reading or assessed an audiobook performance. The interpretation and proposed revisions are HoneyBooks' own; distinctive critical reservations are attributed where they inform the discussion.