Iron Flame (The Empyrean #2)

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I crammed Fourth Wing and Iron Flame as prep for my Onyx Storm book club, and the back-to-back read positively skewed my perspective. Iron Flame is clearly a placeholder book; it rides off the momentum of the first, so it’s going to feel less page-turnery, and it’s setting the stage for shit to go down in the third. Friends gave me the general sentiment that I should have low expectations, so I did. But even though it had more lulls than the first book, I still thought it was pretty good (in binge format).

I continue to like the little twists. Yarros keeps the story chugging along and then sprinkles in ~oh wow!~ morsels without completely derailing the plot. I particularly liked the cliffhanger ending of the book and its future implications. This book widens the world, bringing new characters and regions into the fold, and a realistic tension comes with this newfound comimngling. So, similar to the flowers I gave Fourth Wing, I appreciate that the character dynamics of this book are rooted in realism. The cadets are suspicious of these newbies, and perhaps rightfully so.

Unfortunately, despite the book’s merits, Violet, the main character, is SO annoying. Why must these heroines be so annoying (ahem, Feyre in the ACOTAR series)? In Iron Flame, Violet spends half the book complaining that she can’t trust Xaden because he hid some things from her. I hate this trope. Xaden was completely justified in keeping secrets from Violet until he confirmed he could trust her, yet she acts like he should have spilled his guts from day one. DUH he couldn’t tell you everything– you wouldn’t have even been able to comprehend half of his secrets because you literally just showed up to the joint. Violet also exudes pick-me energy, albeit not as egregiously as Feyre. We hear over and over that her biggest weakness is protecting the people she loves because she has soOoOoOo much empathy. It’s giving “my biggest weakness is perfectionism” in an interview. Stop. 

Because of that, I would like to insist that Yarros gives other characters more attention. We don’t necessarily need chapters from their point of view, but let’s shake things up a bit and give airtime to stuff that doesn’t exclusively center around Violet. Just like there’s so much untapped power in their world, there’s so much untapped potential in some other characters–Dain, Mira, and Violet’s mom, to name a few. 

Sure, this book isn’t as interesting as the first, but I never expected it to be. I’m still interested in the series as a whole, and Iron Flame receives 3 out of 5 flames.

**SPOILERS BELOW** 

General thoughts I wrote down while reading:

-Why don’t the dragons tell their riders more? They know wayyyy more than the humans and if they helped their riders, they would also be helping themselves, which you’d think they’d wanna do. Yarros disappoints here because I thought that by now we’d get more insight into how the dragons operate and what the hierarchy of their circle is like outside of human interaction

-Jack Barlowe is soooo venin coded, I like that twist

-They make the leadership seem really one-dimensional. Violet’s mom is presented like a robot so I didn’t really care when she died, sorry

-The gryphons seem lame

-’Wyvern’ and ‘venin’ are too similar to both be villain names. You can’t both have Vs

-Am I the only one that glazes over during the battle scenes? Like ok you glided across the dragon’s tail and did a somersault onto the other dragon. Sure

-Yes, Dain is lame because he’s a narc goody-two shoes, but I still wish Yarros had dragged out a love triangle with Dain-Violet-Xaden more just for funesies