First Time Reading the Series - Problems With Iron Flame…
So I’ve been reading the series for the first time to catch up for Threshing Day! Fourth Wing was actually the first ever romantasy I read and I was so surprised at how much I LOVED it! I‘m a literature postgrad graduate and love SFF but hadn’t read any romantasy. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. I really thought Violet was a great protagonist, the romance was earned and I bought into it fully, the dragons were fantastic and the plot was insanely readable. I felt like a teenager all over again staying up late to know what happens!
I’ve just read Iron Flame this month and unfortunately didn’t love it. I found it just as readable and there were some fantastic plot twists, but a lot of things became quite frustrating to me: namely, Violet. Does it stop being quite so YA and filled with drama and Mary Sue behaviour in Onyx Storm? I want more on the world and the squad and Mira!! I want the relationship between her and Xaden to feel earned rather than filled with pointless conflict and I want to get less stuff thrown in just for an action sequence but rather because it truly feels relevant to the plot. It ended up losing a lot of its weight by the end because I felt Yarros just did too many things in a repetitive manner and I was getting frustrated. There were a lot of elements introduced here as well that I just did not understand! Like runes and wardstones etc
Please do follow along with me over on YouTube if you’re interested and want to get much more detailed reasons as to why I felt the way that I did but I really really need someone to talk to about this book! Because I was just upset with how up and down it was compared to Fourth Wing. And I have so many questions. Did anyone else feel the same? Does it improve?