Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is everything you want out of a popcorn romantasy with dragons ... until it isn't. However, keep in mind that for many people, the "until it isn't" part never happens, which explains why the novel's rating is so high. 

For me, Fourth Wing was a bit of a struggle in that it felt like five stars on the front end but couldn't sustain five stars through the middle before crashing on several one-star cringe moments on the back end. At the start, I didn't even mind that it wasn't the most original story nor that the protagonist, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail, sounded like she was a 12-year-old with ADHD and in heat most of the time. Ergo, Violet is easily distracted by the male body, even while sparring, sometimes excited by the smell of her opponent. Of course, when she isn't addressing her lustful intentions at the most ridiculous moments, Violet loves to info dump, spoiling any tension before it can take off.

Still, I accepted this as her character, likening the book to a tamer young adult version (with lackluster writing) of the Red Rising series on the sci-fi front and Game of Thrones on the fantasy front, with a plotline super similar to everything like the Divergent and Hunger Game series. (In fact, if you read some of the more brutal reviews, you will find a litany of copycat moments.) But this is NO young adult series despite its cast of 20-somethings who come across like deeply immature middle-school students at a dragon rider training school without any safety nets. 

If it were a young adult novel, Yarros wouldn't have needed to dump in some elicit sex scenes near the end. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind sex as a plot point nor blush when I read authors like Updike or Salter (or any other author predisposed to inject sex into their work). But what makes Yarros different is that her scenes read like Penthouse letters of old, both explicit and crass, as they might be rewritten by, once again, a middle schooler. 

By the time I reached this point in the novel, I was utterly baffled. The book had already slipped from five to four stars, but now I was reading one-star smut that lent nothing to the story. If that wasn't bad enough, Fourth Wing does a nose dive when it finally reveals the true arch nemesis of the story — a species of humans with veiny eyes who yield magic directly from the source (rather than through a dragon or griffin). For whatever reason, this is the ultimate abomination, akin to choosing the dark side of the Force. And it is in confronting these wiley wizards and their wyverns, Fourth Wing loses all steam, becoming predictable and overwrote without any tension one would expect from an epic battle.  

By the end, I felt like Yarros threw every trope imaginable at me (and none of them done well). I was left scratching my head, wondering what the heck just happened. So, when writing the review, I decided to split the difference. The front end comes on strong as an addictive romantasy that never finds its true potential (partly because the writing just isn't that good) before descending into a mindless, numbing mess of gratuitous sex and poorly handled combat. Even the characters are confused by the end of it — which shouldn't be the case because they aren't that deep anyway. 

Is there any other reason to give it three stars? Yes, I suppose. I'm just interested enough in the story that I'll likely carry on with the series at some point when I need something entirely mindless to listen to (as audiobooks are the way to go with one moving forward). Why? I don't know. Why do we sometimes watch bad movies that we know are bad? 

And with that, in closing, I will caution some curious non-fantasy readers: Please don't let Fourth Wing be your introduction to fantasy because it might be set in a thinly developed fantasy world with dragons; it's not a fantasy in any classic sense of the genre. And I don't mean that in a good way.