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Bonus Preview: FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros
00:08:43
Jeff and Rebecca talk about their experience reading Fourth Wing.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to a teaser for Book Riot Podcast premium content. If you want to hear the rest, join us@patreon.com bookriotpodcast for just $10 a month, get access to our full library of premium content. In addition to receiving early ad free access to the regular episodes you hear in the show. Here we go.
- [00:24]
B
Rebecca, let's start here with Fourth Wing. How did the actual experience of reading it comport with your expectation of what it was going to be like?
- [00:34]
A
Well, I had managed to basically avoid knowing what it was about other than there were dragons and sex. It was. Well, I don't know. So I didn't really have expectations, I guess. I think it was about what I. As far as I did have expectations, I think it was about what I expected. It reads a lot younger.
- [01:02]
B
Yeah.
- [01:03]
A
Than I was expecting. That was one place that was really different. And I have seen a lot of folks online being pedantic about this is not young adult. This is a book for adults. It just has younger characters.
- [01:15]
B
She's 20, right?
- [01:17]
A
Right. She's like, 20. It's for new adults. It's in that category, you know, like, she's 20. I think this is for folks who have aged out of the, like, official cat, like the official age group for young adult readers. They're over 18. And it has explicit sex. But it felt to me like Harry Potter with boning in a lot of ways, which I think is kind of what I expected. I had read a lot of summaries of Acotar and I. And I. I think I expected more of the Acotar tropes that I had heard about to show up here as well. But I understand those are pretty difficult. Should we tell the people what it's about?
- [01:57]
B
So the main character, we. We enter in Media Res, which actually was kind of interesting, where she's on her way to be to dragon riding school, but she was supposed to spend her life in the library and her mom is the general. And we need you to be a writer, even though you can be broken like a twig, but, oh, well, if you die and turns out she's awesome at everything and gets all the powers and everyone wants to boner. And I know you're all gonna be surprised that the dark, mysterious bad boy who is at least 4 inches above 6ft tall.
- [02:32]
A
I mean, oh, my God, that's. That is an actual sentence.
- [02:35]
B
Could be six, four and a half for all I know.
- [02:37]
A
He said he. He has to be at least 4 inches above 6ft tall. Very strange to do how did the sentence he's got to be at least 64 escape Rebecca years or the.
- [02:47]
B
The powers that. And lo and behold, she. He actually is so compelled by her that she just had to be nagging her the whole time mean just her own good. It's. Everything's her own good, except that she's good at everything. And there's war with some weavers. And there's 400 pages of groaning exposition clunkily delivered in the form of dialogue about how this world works.
- [03:11]
A
And there's powers that be that turn out to be keeping secrets actually happening in the world.
- [03:17]
B
And then there's a significant and foreseeable cliffhanger surprise at the end. It was quite a bit worse than I was expecting, I'll be honest.
- [03:28]
A
The. The writing was better than I expected. But that saying much. Well, hold on, because I was expecting Colleen Hoover.
- [03:37]
B
It wasn't.
- [03:38]
A
No. Yeah, I guess Hoover is worse.
- [03:43]
B
So it is the assemblage. You know how Deadpool the character is supposed to be like leftover genetic material from all these mutant.
- [03:49]
A
You don't know.
- [03:50]
B
Maybe you do know. Maybe I do know.
- [03:52]
A
I've seen it.
- [03:52]
B
He's sort of leftover. But the psalm then becomes an interesting amalgam. This assemblage of runoff from greater peers felt so constructed that it felt so like everything was a shadow. Everything felt to me, I should say, as a shadow of something that did a better and earlier and more interesting.
- [04:16]
A
Well, yeah. And when we talked about it a little bit offline, we were trying not to spoil this conversation. I think we were both saying it feels like it was factory made for kids who grew up reading Harry Potter and the Hunger Games. And in fact it was, you know, like the folks at Red Tower.
- [04:33]
B
We should do this with dragons. Like. Yeah, we should.
- [04:36]
A
Yeah. That there was a gap in the market that people who grew up reading children's and young adult fantasy didn't have new adult fantasy. They wanted to stay in those kinds of worlds, but they wanted it to have grown up themes, which is just code for their. They wanted there to be sex and for the character's issues to be a little bit more complex. So it's like Violet, the main character, she is Hermione Katniss and Bella Swan all rolled into one.
- [05:00]
B
Yeah.
- [05:01]
A
Like she's smarter than everybody. She's braver than everybody, but also she is weak. Like she is physically weak. She has this condition where her. Her bones are very brittle.
- [05:13]
B
Her Mr. Glass from Unbreakable.
- [05:15]
A
Kind of a condition to break the. Like the One thing I think this book does well, and I don't know if it's intentional or not, is disability representation.
- [05:24]
B
Yeah, that.
- [05:25]
A
Like a friend of mine who has Ehlers Danlos syndrome, which it sounds like that is what Violet has messaged me when I put this on Instagram and said that, like, the book has been very affirming for members of their community because it's cool to see a character who has that condition become stronger and get to do things, and that people recognize that she is not, as a person, as weak as her body is, but in the tropes of young adult fiction that are just slightly grown up for the book, it's. She needs somebody to watch over her and take care of her. Or at least everybody else thinks that she needs somebody to watch over her and take care of.
- [06:05]
B
But also she sort of does because of Xander and what's his name. Right. Murdered, like, day one.
- [06:10]
A
Right. But. Right. Everybody's trying to kill her. So she literally does need someone to be like. She needs to be guarded and protected from the world, from everyone else. But she doesn't want any of that because she's desperate to prove her independence. But also she's attracted to the guy who wants to be controlling. Like, it's very Bella and Edward there. And the character even kind of knows this. She's like, this is so toxic. And she uses the word.
- [06:36]
B
That's one of the things that drove me nuts is like, contemporary colloquialisms dropped in, just like.
- [06:43]
A
Yeah. And. And then they get around it. Like, this kind of behavior from men is. Is toxic and problematic. But Rebecca Girros cleverly gets around it because Violet and Xander can't. Or Xander, whatever his name is, can't help but be drawn to each other because their dragons are bonded to each other. So, like, it's not her fault that she's attracted to this guy who has pretty, like, gaslighty, emotionally abusive behavioral patterns.
- [07:15]
B
Yeah. I mean, the. So I remember in reading about Roxane gay writing about 50 shades of gray, I'll never forget this. She points out there's a sentence where E.L. james writes, describes the wine as white Pinot Grigio. Right? And if you know anything about wine, all Pinot Grigio is white. That's an unnecessarily uninformed. Are you. Either they're sloppy or uninformed, and it kind of doesn't matter, because the point is that mistake doesn't matter because that's not what it's about.
- [07:48]
A
Right.
- [07:49]
B
And there's stuff like that in this, that like strong and powerful muscles. Well, that's the same thing. You don't need them. But like, that's not the point. The point isn't the language. It's not the specificity. It's not even being right. The point is, as far as I can tell, and you can tell me if I'm reading this wrong, is to have this fantasy world and then super build up all this sexual tension and then literally blow the windows out of the room with 50 orgasms. I don't know. I lost count. I don't know. It's like a lightning storm. The cell was going all over the place.
- [08:24]
A
Count.
- [08:24]
B
How can you stay hydrated?
- [08:25]
A
Count them.
- [08:26]
B
They're not drinking any water.
- [08:29]
A
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