Iron Flame Review

most for me between the two books. In fourth wing they felt distant. A threat you were told about rather than one you experienced. Iron flame makes them real and specific and frightening in a way that raises the actual stakes of the series considerably. I started reading the empyrean books thinking this was a fantasy romance where the fantasy was the setting and the romance was the point. By the end of iron flame i think i had that backwards. The romance is the heart but the fantasy is doing real work now and the two things are genuinely intertwined rather than existing in separate compartments.

The romance goes through a difficult stretch in the middle that i found harder to get through than i expected. The reasons for it are embedded in the plot in a way that makes sense but the execution felt a little mechanical at times like yarros knew she needed to create distance between them for the later payoff to work and was not quite sure how to make that distance feel natural rather than manufactured. It is the part of the book i would go back and change if i could. The payoff when it comes is earned but getting there requires more patience than the first book asked of you.

The ending. I am not going to say what happens but i will say that yarros clearly decided after two books of building something that it was time to actually break it and she does. The final section moved very fast and i read the last hundred pages in one sitting because i physically could not stop and the last few pages left me in the specific kind of stunned silence that only happens when a book does something you knew was coming and manages to hit you with it anyway. I immediately wanted onyx storm and felt slightly furious that i had to wait for it which is about as good a review as a sequel can get.

Xaden getting point of view chapters is the best structural decision yarros made in this book. I spent all of fourth wing trying to work out what he was actually thinking and feeling beneath the controlled surface he shows violet and getting access to that in iron flame retroactively makes a lot of things from the first book land differently. He is more complicated than the first book lets you see and his chapters are written with a different quality of interiority than violet's which is a harder thing to do than it sounds. His voice feels distinct in a way that matters.