Tag Archives: Yarros

Audiobook Review: Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros audiobook edition cover

Story: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrator: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I enjoyed this sequel and plan to continue the series, but I gave it 3 stars for 3 reasons:

  1. The plot dragged in places
  2. The main relationship was less spicy
  3. I started wondering what the bad guys were doing for the 1,000 years they weren’t around and the more I thought about it the more cardboard the villains seemed.

I also read this book to fulfill the January prompt for the Magical Readathon: Orilium A Year in Aeldia Reading Challenge 2024. January presented two choices and my character, Vaughn, chose to rely on his wits to get out of a dungeon, which meant reading an audiobook. Who is Vaughn and why was he in a dungeon? Read on to find out!

Ken Hidaka, a character in the anime Weiß Kreuz

Vaughn is an electricity elemental known as a Lightning. Physically he is based on Ken Hidaka from the anime Weiß Kreuz. He uses a pair of goggles with magical liquid crystal display lenses and has a gauntlet that turns into any tool he needs and allows him to channel magic. An apprentice Craftsmage, his original goal in attending Orilium University was to make the first magical database, but his extracurricular experiences may be leading him down another path. Vaughn has already obtained keys to the secret alchemy lab and the secret library, and his new goal is to obtain all the keys to the entire university. He’s started carrying a set of magical lock picks at all times. So when his friend Tori wanted to do some urban spelunking to explore the university’s underground, he was all in! They were arrested for trespassing, but Vaughn wasn’t fazed. He just whipped the lock picks out of his shoe and went to work.

The adventure will continue next month!

Book review: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros audiobook edition cover
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros audiobook edition cover

Narrated by Rebecca Soler and Teddy Hamilton

Source: 📚 library via Libby

Narration: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Story: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros keeps moving quickly, which is a good thing for an action-heavy novel. There are no slow spots. The world-building is solid without a lot of info-dumping. The dragons are wonderful, though I do wonder about their population health because each color seems to originate with a single dragon and that can’t be good genetically. The politics are present but not overwhelming and drive the plot and action forward instead of turning it into a boring slog. As someone with hypermobility, I appreciate that the heroine, Violet, copes with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The enemies-to-lovers romance between Violet and Xaden is believable and the spicy scenes are well-written.

I’d categorize Fourth Wing as Coming of Age rather than YA because of the amount of sex and cursing, and that the protagonists are college age men and women — a fact it’s hard to remember sometimes. That’s partly because of the characters’ maturity level and partly because the narrators sound younger.

I gave four instead of five stars because there were several times I rolled my eyes at Violet. For such an intelligent girl she was sometimes rather slow on the uptake and really had a hard time adjusting her worldview to fit new facts. The narration emphasized her youth in these moments, adding to my impression that the characters were high schoolers instead of college age.

Speaking of the narration, overall it was good, but some words were terribly mispronounced. I also didn’t really like the male narrator, Teddy Hamilton. He didn’t seem like quite the right fit for Xander. I would have preferred if Rebecca Soler narrated the whole book. But then I’m not usually a fan of multiple narrators.

Overall I’d say Fourth Wing lives up to the hype and is worth a read. I plan to read the sequel, Iron Flame.

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