Iron Flame

The review

Violet survived her first year at Basgiath War College. Now she knows what the kingdom has been hiding, and so does everyone who wants her dead. Iron Flame picks up straight after Fourth Wing's ending, with a new vice commandant who has made Violet his personal project, a war that is no longer hypothetical, and a relationship with Xaden that has to survive the secrets he is still keeping.

The sequel trades the shock of discovery for the grind of survival. Second-year training is crueler, the politics are bigger and Violet spends much of the book being hunted by an authority figure who wants information she cannot give. Yarros leans hard into the cost of knowing the truth, and the stakes for every character Violet loves go up.

The romance is the core tension. Violet and Xaden are together, but trust is the problem: she wants every answer, he keeps doling them out one at a time, and the book is as much about whether a relationship can survive secrets as it is about dragons. Readers either love the push and pull or want to shake them both. Tairn and Andarna continue to steal every scene.

The heat: four peppers. There are more open-door scenes than in Fourth Wing and they are explicit, though spread across a very long book. The rider bond adds an intimacy that goes beyond the physical.

Know before you start: it is long, the middle drags for some readers, and the climax is enormous. It ends on another cliffhanger that sets up Onyx Storm. You must read Fourth Wing first; nothing here makes sense without it. If you finished book one desperate for answers, you get a lot of them, and a new set of questions to replace them.

Read it if you finished Fourth Wing yelling at the last page. Skip it if the relationship drama of two people refusing to communicate drives you up the wall; there is a lot of it before the payoff.