Abstract
This review undertakes a critical assessment of Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (2023), the inaugural volume of the Empyrean series and a defining commercial success within the burgeoning romantasy genre. Rather than treating the novel’s popularity as self-justifying, the review examines its narrative premise, its first-person present-tense technique, and its treatment of embodiment and chronic illness through the figure of its protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, whose physical fragility is rendered without recourse to magical compensation or narrative erasure. The review further considers the novel’s more conspicuous limitations, among them a faction-based worldbuilding structure that recalls earlier young adult dystopias, an uneven prose style in its expository opening, and a political subplot left comparatively undeveloped. Drawing on the novel itself alongside a range of published reviews, the analysis concludes that Fourth Wing succeeds substantially within the generic terms it sets for itself, even where its architecture betrays the seams of its borrowings, and that its achievements are best measured against the conventions of romantasy rather than against the more structurally ambitious traditions of secondary-world epic fantasy.
Keywords: Fourth Wing; Rebecca Yarros; romantasy; book review; disability representation; genre fiction
Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing arrives amid a publishing moment in which the boundary separating epic fantasy from popular romance has grown deliberately porous, and the novel’s runaway commercial success testifies to how precisely it has calibrated itself to that porousness. Within weeks of its release the book had ascended to the top of Amazon’s sales rankings and, by the close of 2023, secured a place among Publishers Weekly’s bestselling titles of the year (“Rebecca Yarros”). Such reception, however, ought not to preempt critical scrutiny; a novel’s velocity through the marketplace is no substitute for an assessment of its narrative architecture, its prose, and its ideological commitments. This review undertakes that assessment, attending in turn to the novel’s premise, its principal achievements, and its more conspicuous shortcomings, before arriving at a summary judgment of its place within the burgeoning genre its admirers have taken to calling romantasy.
The novel follows Violet Sorrengail, a physically fragile young woman who had prepared for a sedentary vocation within the Scribe Quadrant of Navarre’s military academy, only to be conscripted by her mother, a general of considerable renown, into the far more lethal Rider Quadrant at Basgiath War College (Yarros). There, cadets compete for the diminishing favor of dragons whose bonding is frequently as fatal as it is transformative, and Violet must additionally negotiate a volatile entanglement with Xaden Riorson, a fellow rider whose father her mother had previously ordered executed for treason. Yarros constructs this premise through a first-person, present-tense narration that lends the prose an immediacy verging on the cinematic, a technique more commonly associated with adolescent fiction than with a novel whose content, replete with graphic violence and explicit sexuality, is unambiguously intended for an adult readership (Berrow).
Among the novel’s most defensible achievements is its treatment of embodiment and disability. Violet’s physical fragility, later specified as a connective-tissue disorder, is not a decorative vulnerability to be narratively resolved but a persistent condition she must continually negotiate even as she proves her competence within an institution structured to eliminate the weak. Sally Berrow observes that this portrayal draws directly upon Yarros’s own experience of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and that the author renders her protagonist’s chronic pain with a specificity that readers living with comparable conditions have found unusually validating (Berrow). This is not an incidental virtue. Popular fantasy has historically conscripted disability into allegory or overcome it through magical compensation; Yarros instead allows Violet’s body to remain recalcitrant throughout, a choice that lends the novel’s insistence upon her competence a credibility that a more conventionally able heroine would not have earned. The pacing, too, merits commendation: the narrative’s relentless momentum, its habit of closing chapters upon reversals or revelations, sustains a propulsive readability that numerous reviewers have identified as the novel’s chief pleasure (Berrow).
The novel’s shortcomings are, however, not negligible. Its worldbuilding, for all its superficial elaborateness, borrows its structural logic so directly from the faction-based dystopias of the previous decade’s young adult boom that certain readers have found the resemblance distracting rather than merely intertextual; one reviewer likens the sorting of cadets into quadrants to the sorting mechanism of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, a comparison that, once made, proves difficult to unsee (“Fantasy Book Review”). The prose, moreover, is uneven in its opening chapters, where exposition is delivered with a bluntness that several readers have characterized as dry before the narrative’s momentum overtakes its expository obligations (“Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros”). Nor is the political intrigue that Yarros gestures toward, concerning the kingdom of Navarre’s suppression of an alleged rebel insurgency, developed with the intricacy that epic fantasy at its most accomplished typically affords; it functions largely as scaffolding for the romance and the academy’s trials rather than as an object of sustained interrogation in its own right.
These limitations notwithstanding, Fourth Wing succeeds on the terms it sets for itself. It does not aspire to the structural complexity of secondary-world epic fantasy in the tradition of its more literary forebears, and to fault it for that omission would be to judge it by a rubric it never claimed. Its ambitions are more modest and more precisely realized: a propulsive, emotionally saturated narrative of survival, competence, and desire, anchored by a protagonist whose vulnerability is rendered without condescension. Considered against the conventions of the romantasy genre it has done much to popularize, the novel is a genuinely accomplished specimen, even where its architecture reveals the seams of its borrowings. Considered against the broader tradition of fantasy literature, its achievements are more modest, and readers seeking sustained worldbuilding or political complexity would do well to look elsewhere. Within its own generic terms, however, Fourth Wing earns the devotion it has inspired.
Works Cited
Berrow, Sally. “Review: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.” Grimdark Magazine, 13 June 2023, www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-fourth-wing-by-rebecca-yarros/.
“Fantasy Book Review: ‘Fourth Wing’ (The Empyrean #1) by Rebecca Yarros.” What Is Quinn Reading?, www.whatisquinnreading.com/reviews/fourth-wing-book-review.
“Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.” Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, 16 Oct. 2023, smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/fourth-wing-by-rebecca-yarros/.
“Rebecca Yarros.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Yarros. Accessed 14 Sept. 2026.
Yarros, Rebecca. Fourth Wing. Entangled: Red Tower Books, 2023.