Fourth Wing is a fantasy novel published by Rebecca Yarros in 2023. Already wildly successful as a writer of romances, the novel was the author’s first foray into the genre dominated by flying dragons. It only takes until the third paragraph of the story for the book’s young first-person narrator/protagonist to drop an F-bomb, however, so readers should not feel too far afield from their own present reality.
That narrator is Violet Sorrengail who has reached the mandatory conscription age of twenty and must take her part in the never-ending war between Navarre and Poromeil. Although she suffers from a medical condition leaving her in chronic pain, Violet becomes a cadet trained as a dragon rider. A comprehensive summary of the events of the novel requires extensive explanation of the world built by the author, but the story basically follows Violet through her training, her emotionally conflicted romance with a fellow cadet, and her gradual understanding that her views toward the righteousness of Navarre’s side in the conflict is corrupted by political ambitions behind the scenes. The typical elements found in a novel of this type—magic abilities and convenient coincidences such abilities inevitably allow—are found in abundance, but they serve a purpose that subverts expectations.
A key line to this subversion has the narrator asserting that “One of the purposes of the fables is to teach children about the dangers of too much power…the monsters that hide beneath our beds when we have nightmares.” The story of Violet’s training and interaction with other twenty-year-old draftees committed to a war they have been raised since birth to believe has them fighting on the side of good eventually is revealed to be not entirely true. Although Violet is training to fight the Poromeil, she will be forced to question whether they are her true enemy or whether the enemy lies much closer and more intimately.
Couched within the generic conventions of another fantasy novel about flying dragons is a deeper examination of the purpose of war. From the very start, things do not seem quite right. Violet’s physical condition is not one which makes her an obvious choice for riding dragons and at the last minute she is shifted from a seemingly more suitable path to the dragon riders division. Making this decision all the stranger is that it is her own mother, a general in the army, who pushes her into the more dangerous job. It is a decision that hardly seems to be in the best interest of her daughter.
This unexpected and seemingly inexplicable decision mirrors what will happen to many of the characters who are fellow cadets. They are all purposely being put into precarious situations in which their very lives are threatened during the training experience, but all gladly do so because they are under the assumption that the war is a simple case of good versus evil. While there is a romance built into the story, the real thematic meat of the book is the examination how war is more complicated than the patriotic fervor used as propaganda on either side would have one believe. Violet and her fellow cadets must come face to face with the reality that what they have assumed is fact may be, at least in part, mere fable.
