Iron Flame
| Published | 2023-11-07 |
| Series | The Empyrean — Book 2 of 5 |
| Genre | Fantasy Romance, New Adult Fiction |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Red Tower Books |
| ISBN-10 | 1649374178 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1649374172 |
📝Honest Review
the story picks up right where Fourth Wing left off. Violet knows things now that she cannot unknow and the people around her are either already living with that knowledge or about to have it dropped on them. the war college structure that gave the first book its shape is still there but it is no longer the whole world. things are happening outside Basgiath that matter and Yarros is not going to let you stay comfortable inside the walls any more than the characters can.
the venin are the thing that changed 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.
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.
Violet herself continues to be one of the better protagonists i have encountered in this genre. the thing about her is that she is actually smart. she notices things and makes connections and her limitations are real and consistent rather than selective plot devices. watching her process what she learns about Navarre in this book is genuinely satisfying because you can see her working through it rather than just being surprised by it and then accepting it. she gets angry in ways that feel proportionate to what she has been lied to about.
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.
four stars. not quite as tight as the first book but bigger in almost every way that matters and the ending alone is worth the slightly uneven middle.
Summary:
Violet Sorrengail survived her first year at Basgiath War College. now comes the second year and Xaden Riorson said it best right at the start of this book when he told her the first year is when some of them lose their lives and the second year is when the rest lose their humanity. the war against the venin is getting worse and the things Violet learns about Navarre and the people running it start to pull the ground out from under everything she thought she knew. bigger than the first book in almost every way and considerably harder to put down.
✅ What I Liked
the world gets so much bigger in this book and that is the thing i liked most about it. Fourth Wing was mostly contained inside Basgiath and the world building felt like it was being rationed a little. Iron Flame opens everything up. the venin threat becomes real and specific rather than a rumour you hear about, the politics of Navarre start to feel genuinely sinister, and Violet's understanding of what her government has been lying about and for how long shifts the whole story in a direction that gives the series a lot more weight than a fantasy romance has any right to have. Xaden's sections written from his point of view were a surprise i did not see coming and they are some of my favourite pages in the book. getting inside his head properly after spending all of Fourth Wing trying to read him from the outside is exactly what the second book needed to do and Yarros pulls it off. the ending is devastating in the way that only a book you genuinely care about can be devastating and i sat with it for a while after i finished.
❌ What Could Be Better
the middle section sags in a way the first book did not. Fourth Wing moved at a pace that made the pages disappear. Iron Flame is longer and there are stretches roughly in the centre of the book where the plotting slows down and it starts to feel like Yarros is managing the distance between where the story is and where it needs to get to. some of the new characters introduced in this book are not given quite enough room to become real before they are asked to carry emotional weight. i also think the romance goes through a rough patch that goes on slightly longer than it needs to and while i understand why Yarros did it the tension between Violet and Xaden in those chapters felt more frustrating than exciting in a way that did not always feel intentional. these are not big problems but they are the reason this sits at four stars for me rather than four and a half the way the first book almost did.
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