Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is an enlightening book, not precisely for being a literary masterpiece, but for originating a new marketing case study on consumer behavior.
As I write these lines, Fourth Wing sits at Amazon with a mesmerizing 285,000 ratings averaging 4.8 out of 5 stars, and 278,000 reviews on Goodreads and an average rating of 4.57. To put it in perspective, The Beatles merchandise ratings add up to tens of thousands. The Harry Potter box set features sixty thousand ratings -with Sorcerer’s stone leading with 130,000. Granted it is possible a significant percentage of those 285,000 ratings are spam, still would it be safe to say that even at the worst case, at least a third of them are legit? Maybe a quarter? Does that mean that 70,000 people made a conscious decision to rate this book a collective 4.8 out of 5? Not even Game of Thrones, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings feature comparable numbers. “There has to be something astonishly great about it”, I thought. Spoilers: there is not.
I got my hands on Fourth wing while I was also reading another fantasy sci-fi story (Sun – The Reborn series). I realized I needed some sort of compass from the genre in order to properly review Sun, so I figured that using Fourth wing as reference would be the best choice based on the recent trend that has driven its popularity to stratospheric heights. “Maybe this is the standard of the sci-fi fantasy genre”, I thought.
As I breezed through the pages, a recurring thought would accompany my reading: “Who can enjoy this book? The writing is predictable, the characters have every possible stereotype you can imagine, the plot is non-sensical… so what is so great about it?
Some of the highlights include (general paraphrasing):
“I love you, but I can’t…”
“You are not meant to be a dragon rider, because you are (insert random challenge) …”
“He is so evil to me, and that’s what makes him so irresistible…”
There is nothing wrong with these cliches. In fact, there is nothing wrong with teenage love and artists exploiting it. This is the same wave Ed Sheeran and even The Beatles rode during their initial years as band. Unlike the former, fortunately the latter evolved from the trend, and that is how they became the greatest influential band in occidental music, but back in their early pop days, you just had to switch off the thinking part of your brain, pay no attention to the lyrics, and enjoy the ride for what it was. In order to finish Fourth wing, you may have to do the same thing: enjoy the fantastic amalgamation of the highlights from some of the most successful artistic works from the past twenty years:
1. Dragons, from Game of Thrones.
2. A school / training location setting, from Harry Potter.
3. A major war taking place in middle Earth, as in Lord of the Rings.
4. A frail female lead character, like in Divergent.
5. A romance element of a young female discovering love, as in Twilight.
6. A young female lead character with outstanding skills, like in Hunger Games.
7. A spectacular very explicit sex narrative, as in… well, all books that need a spectacular very explicit sex narrative because the core elements of proper writing are missing.
…so the problem that I kept running into was that every time I flipped a page, I found myself saying / THINKING out loud: “That’s from Game of Thrones”, or “Oh, just like it happened in Lord of the Rings”, or “Ok, this kind of feels like that scene from Divergent”. Therefore, unless you haven’t read any of those books (or watched the movies), Fourth Wing -like Sun- will hardly surprise you. With so many references, I felt like this book tried to cover multiple ideas, and while it didn’t quite fail at its attempt, it never truly succeeded because it neither displayed any originality, nor it developed any of the themes to a deeper level. It is hard to become interested in a story where so little effort has been made on its construct.
Even with the critical part of my brain switched off, there were two things that slightly bothered me about the book. The first one was the hardest to get past by: the dialogue. It was a little off-putting that the personalities of these middle Earth / medieval characters resembled modern 202X Tik-Tok teenagers. For most of the book I felt like I was overhearing a conversation from a group of kids hanging out at a New York City bar. I was actually expecting Violet to say something like: “Fuck me!! This is so cool!” I was actually shocked it did not happen. It was very disappointing to read such poorly written teenage dialogue. For context, good dialogue written for teenage characters would be: Arya Stark, Frodo Baggins, or Harry Potter. They do not say “Fuck” every other line.
The second grip was from a contextual perspective given the setting where the narrative takes place. I am guessing that this war has been going on for quite some time, and that after several years of fighting it has taken its toll on Navarre. The vast efforts to win the war are palpable, meaning that hundreds if not thousands of people are needed to win it. If that is the case, then why do volunteers who are not skilled in a particular trade have to die. Why not give them another job and sign up for something else? I get it. Becoming a Dragon rider is a life-or-death deal, but couldn’t they become supply carriers, healer assistants, or something to that effect, as it happened with Starship Troopers, or even that goofy movie Hot Shots?
As it happened with Sun, there is nothing profound in Fourth wing. There is no major revelation, no major character transformation, no grand arc, and nothing to have it stand out as a literary masterpiece. Did I dislike Fourth wing? No. Would I recommend it? I can come up with dozens of other better books to read over this book that felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon show that dragged on forever.
There is nothing wrong with Fourth wing. Unless you don’t want to be singled out as the one person in your circle who hasn’t read it, you are honestly not missing anything special by not reading it. On the contrary, you are missing a lot in life if you have not read Dune, 1984, The Prince, or the Divine Comedy. Fourth wing is just an average book that has all the ingredients to become hugely popular (which it did), but not transcendent. The characters are decent, the story is decent, the writing is mediocre. 4.8 out of 5, as in better than War and Peace, Don Quixote, and Huckleberry Finn? No.
A quarter of a million ratings averaging 4.8 out of 5. Maybe it is just my opinion that Fourth wing is not that great and in reality, it is. Maybe it is not that great, and a quarter of a million people are unfamiliar with past literary works Fourth wing not only draws inspiration from, but actually copies ideas from. Maybe the roles of good writing have reversed and The Divine Comedy, The Trial, and Great expectations are being revealed as poorly written, and Fourth wing is the proponent of the new literary world order. Then again, I want to think there is a reason why these literary works have survived for hundreds of years, and are still studied to this day. Will Fourth wing become one of them too? Only time will tell… or maybe it will become an HBR case study.
HR