A review by emilycfox
Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

adventurous challenging dark tense fast-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Not quite as good as Fourth Wing (honestly, that might be impossible so I knew it probably wouldn’t / couldn’t be), but Iron Flame still had a death grip on me until I finished it. I read FW and IF back-to-back, and I felt like I was living on adrenaline and almost disassociated from my life because ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS READ AND ALL I WAS THINKING ABOUT WAS THIS SERIES. I read literally all night until 7am or later multiple times. I was so sad when I finished IF because now I have to wait until the next book is released. But at the same time, the flood of relief I felt when I finished was PALPABLE (like after you turn in the last thing during exam week after running on fumes for days) lol. I was like thank god I’m no longer held captive by these books and can relax now and get back to my normal life haha
A few things that brought it down from 5 stars for me: Violet and Xaden’s relationship dynamic gets pretty repetitive and frustrating, but I’m hoping that it was intentional and we’ll see growth from them moving forward. I also didn’t like how many times the story jumped forward to the next day or several days / weeks later because I felt like I was missing things (like, did they talk about xyz but we didn’t see it or have they not even discussed it?). I just want to know what happens every minute of every day!! Even the “boring” day-to-day stuff because that’s when we get to see Violet’s friends and learn more about the world :( but I also get that it’s already a long book. Similar to FW, the writing is simply fine — not so terrible it ruins the story but also not good (I swear to god everything is measured in heartbeats as if this world does not have any other unit to measure time)
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