Fourth Wing

I'm not really understanding all of the 4 and 5-star reviews - even the threes, quite frankly. I struggled to finish reading this hoping it would redeem itself - spoiler alert - it never does. Poorly written characters in trite and predictable scenarios. A YA feel, but I'd never let my teen read something so poorly written as there are MUCH better examples in the genre. So formula, yet such poor execution. Don't get me started on the lame and lengthy character exposition, constantly telling instead of showing. At least one of the sex scenes in here should have been on the worst written sex scenes for it's year of publication. Okay that's it. I've already spent way to much time on this book. If you haven't guessed I'm not going to be reading the sequel. Not even if you gave me the second installment. Go spend your precious reading time and money on something that's worth it. P. L. Stuart's Drowned Kingdom series would be an excellent series for your next fantasy read!

Girlfriend saw on a large cardboard advertisement for this book in Barnes and Noble that it would leave me with "a hangover". Truly I've no one to blame but myself for not heeding the warning. About 10% of my way through I recall trying to be charitable, but realize now that the lazily shaken cocktail of poorly done tropes, one-dimensional characters, and embarrassingly bad exposition dumping was just making me tipsy. To be clear, this is a badly written book. But I never want to begrudge anyone their fun, and want to acknowledge that if these specific tropes are your jam, then by all means cover yourselves head to toe in the jammy goodness of enemies-to-lovers and magic school hijinks. Otherwise I find so little redeeming this except for the hilariously anachronistic description of a medieval "Wipeout!" obstacle course and extremely suspect (read: incorrect) use of Gaelic and Gaelic-sounding words.

This book was recommended to me by my Physical therapist who was reading it for her book club. It kinda felt like a much darker take on the dragon books I loved growing up from authors like Ann McCaffrey. I did enjoy the darker tone of this book. The constant looming threat of death around every corner, that could take any character at any time when you are least expecting it, added a sense of seriousness and weight to everything that was going on both with the characters and the world as a whole. it's a much more mature edge to the genre then I'm used to, and I made the mistake of reading it while at work, before I fully understood what kind of story this was going to be. I had to hold back tears when a customer came in right after I read a scene near the start of the book where a character i'd grown attached to dyed in a way that was unexpected, sudden and jarring. but that's the whole reason we read non-fiction, to feel things, and this book will definitely make you feel things.