Onyx Storm

i want to start by saying that i went into this with slightly lowered expectations because a lot of readers i follow had mixed feelings about it and i did not want to be disappointed after how much the Iron Flame ending had got to me. by about page fifty those lowered expectations were completely gone and by page two hundred i had accepted that i was not going to be doing anything else until i finished.

Onyx Storm picks up in the aftermath of what happened at the end of Iron Flame and if you have not read that book you need to do that before you come anywhere near this one. the emotional weight of the opening chapters depends entirely on you knowing exactly what was lost and how. Yarros does not re-explain it and she should not have to. she trusts that you are as invested as she is and that trust pays off.

the thing this book does that the first two could not quite do is take Violet out of school. Basgiath is a great setting for a series opener because it gives you a contained world with clear rules and clear hierarchies and a reason for a young protagonist to be learning things the reader also needs to learn. but by the third book in a five book series you need the world to open up and Onyx Storm does that properly. Violet goes to places that have been mentioned in passing across the first two books and they turn out to be exactly as strange and complicated and beautiful as you hoped they would be when their names first appeared. there is a sequence roughly in the middle of the book set somewhere i will not name that is the best extended piece of world building Yarros has done across the whole series and i read it slowly because i did not want it to end.

Xaden in this book is doing something that i think is the most interesting thing about the series at this point. without saying too much about what specifically is happening with him, the choices he is making and the reasons behind them set up a tension between him and Violet that is not the familiar push and pull of enemies to lovers. it is something more uncomfortable than that and more real and it made me feel things about these two people that i have not quite felt before in a fantasy romance. Yarros is asking whether love survives the things people do when survival is at stake and she is not giving you an easy answer and i respect that enormously.

the venin are finally working as proper antagonists in this book. in Fourth Wing they were a rumour. in Iron Flame they were a threat. in Onyx Storm they are a presence and Yarros gives them enough interiority and logic that they stop feeling like an abstract evil and start feeling like a genuine force with their own perspective on what they are doing. that shift does something important to the whole series. it makes the conflict feel more like a real war and less like a story structure and that is a hard thing to pull off in fantasy romance.

the supporting characters get more room in this book than in the previous two and most of them use it well. there are people in Violet's circle who i had not fully believed in before this book who became real to me here and one or two of them do things near the end that hit harder because of that. Yarros is clearly building toward something in the final two books and this one feels like the hinge that everything turns on.

the ending is not the same kind of devastating as Iron Flame's ending. it is a different shape of difficult, quieter in some ways and larger in others, and i sat with it for a while afterward trying to work out exactly how i felt. i am still not entirely sure. that is probably the right response to the middle book of a five book series. you are not supposed to feel resolved. you are supposed to feel like you need the next one.

four stars. the best world building of the three books so far, some of the best character work Yarros has done, and an ending that will make you preorder book four immediately if you have not already.You said: My Friends – Fredrik Backman