Take a photo of a barcode or cover
crimsoncor 's review for:
Fourth Wing (Parts 1 & 2) [Dramatized Adaptation]
by Rebecca Yarros
Going to say I ended up being pleasantly surprised with this. The first half isn't great. The writing is quite poor. Violet reciting facts when scared is used as a tool for exposition dumping and is just bad. Immersion-breaking and snicker-worthy. This is basically completely dropped in the second half of the book.
I spent a lot of the book wondering if it was a) really clueless, b) building towards a slight subversion, or c) building towards a real "are we the baddies" moment, and ended up being surprised with went with c. A lot of the world-building still feels really sloppy; the entire Academy structure seems aimed at producing amoral sociopaths with no unit cohesion. This might be somewhat handle-able given the fallen fascist nature of the government (witness our own current DoD's "warfighter" bullshit) except the dragons are supposed to be these wiser heads and they seem just fine with creating life-long bonds with sociopaths. Doesn't really math up. It also makes the subversion a bit less effective because the baddies are so obviously bad (vs say something like Ender's Game).
While I'm not going to pick too much of a fight with the main character being a magical girl (that is the genre we're in), giving her a disability that never actually prevented her from being the bestest seemed like window-dressing instead of actually grappling with the impact of disabilities on people.
The relationship between Vi and Liam is really well put together and gives the ending a really emotional heft.
Overall, if not for the exceedingly poor writing in the first half of the book, this would be a four.
I spent a lot of the book wondering if it was a) really clueless, b) building towards a slight subversion, or c) building towards a real "are we the baddies" moment, and ended up being surprised with went with c. A lot of the world-building still feels really sloppy; the entire Academy structure seems aimed at producing amoral sociopaths with no unit cohesion. This might be somewhat handle-able given the fallen fascist nature of the government (witness our own current DoD's "warfighter" bullshit) except the dragons are supposed to be these wiser heads and they seem just fine with creating life-long bonds with sociopaths. Doesn't really math up. It also makes the subversion a bit less effective because the baddies are so obviously bad (vs say something like Ender's Game).
While I'm not going to pick too much of a fight with the main character being a magical girl (that is the genre we're in), giving her a disability that never actually prevented her from being the bestest seemed like window-dressing instead of actually grappling with the impact of disabilities on people.
The relationship between Vi and Liam is really well put together and gives the ending a really emotional heft.
Overall, if not for the exceedingly poor writing in the first half of the book, this would be a four.