Another Disappointing Book in a Disappointing Series

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

Pages: 527 Genre: romantasy

Rating: 2.5 Star

Book Club Pick

Warning: I'm going to avoid spoilers for this book (until the end, which will be marked), but I will be referencing things that happen in Fourth Wing (1) and Iron Flame (2). If you're not already invested in this story I can't recommend reading it, but this is your warning regardless.

Tensions have been building for years now, and the war is getting closer every day. As their protections are failing, and as the stakes get higher for Violet, the Empyrean needs to start thinking bigger if they're going to survive. Violet must go beyond the safety of the wards into unknown lands to find power, resources, and the truth. But what's waiting for them back on the Continent is worse than they could've expected.

(If you're thinking to yourself, wow, that's a pretty bad summary, it's because there's no real defined plot within this book to actually describe. Sorry!)

I would give anything to like these books. This book was definitely a lot better than Iron Flame, but to be fair, that's a low bar to clear. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Yarros doesn't have as much of a plan as she thinks she does, resulting in 500+ page books that lack direction and intentionality.

The highlight of the book is the quest that's mentioned in the book's description. I found this section to be the most well-written and engaging portion, but it was disappointing that it was a relatively small section of the plot. Without spoiling it, it's also worth noting that this quest feels incredibly derivative of Divergent, so even the best section of the book is not without its feelings of being a cheap copy of something else.

Outside of this one section, the writing left nothing to be desired. What got to me the most in this book that I don't remember being a problem in the first two was the word choice. First, I understand that the title of the book is "Onyx Storm," but her insistence on using the word onyx instead of black was distracting. "The onyx this" and "the onyx that" felt very out of place considering part of the branding of these books is the modern language. It's okay if Xaden has black eyes. The second main issue with word choice was the frequency of italicized words. Instead of being creative and using illustrative word choice that really puts the reader in the scene, Yarros would just italicize. "And I run" or "he [freaking] winks" (which I believe was used two separate times) or "and I melt" or what have you. It started to feel like a copout, and made the whole thing feel a little bit too corny.

Really it's just starting to feel like, to a certain extent, Yarros is failing to even take pride in her work. It's okay to set out to write a fun series; I'm not expecting her to write a life-changing and foundational piece of literature or anything. But it seems like, at some point, she decided to stop trying and instead just push out whatever crap will sell the quickest. I'm glad that she took some extra time to write it, but it still feels like I'm putting more thought into the series than she is. At one point in this book she has a character make fun of the fact that Xaden and Violet spent all of Iron Flame having the same fight about some stupid thing that didn't even really matter. It's played off as a joke, but it was the biggest critique of the last book. It's an odd choice to me to play off your bad writing decisions as a joke instead of either ignoring it and sticking to the story you believe in or taking those criticisms on and genuinely trying to improve. Instead, it seems like she heard the criticism of Iron Flame and decided, you know what? You're right, this series is bad. So let's just do whatever! This series is set to be five books that will probably be over 2500+ pages. I want her to stop treating it like a silly little joke. The people who like her books deserve that.

Okay, soapbox aside, this book had some major plot issues too. There's too much of a tonal separation between The Plot (the war/defeating the venin) and The Story (day-to-day operations/the smaller plotlines that make up each book). The story of the war is intense and dark. People are dying daily, families and cultures are being displaced, and the people on the frontlines have to move forward knowing they really don't have the power necessary to even match the enemy, so there's not an end in sight. But this is basically the backdrop of an early 2000s teen movie about college. On one page you'll have a heartbreaking description of a town's worth of people being massacred and then on the next Violet will be whining about how her ex is so annoying and childish. I'm supposed to care equally about how hopeless the battle is without the resources needed and the fact that Violet and Xaden can't have sex for the foreseeable future. I think Yarros needs to bring these two aspects of the book together better so that it feels like one comprehensive story instead of two individual plotlines that are fighting for attention.

Where the writing fails me, the characters are even worse. There's some people I enjoy — I thought Sawyer and Aaric both had very engaging arcs in this book, Ridoc is entertaining to be around at least, and I'm still very interested in Brennan and Tairn's mysterious backstory. Unfortunately, though, none of these people actually get to anything interesting because everything that isn't explicitly related to (if we're being honest) Xaden and Violet's relationship gets thrust into the background. I get that they're the main characters, and I understand that it is largely a romance book, but all the fantasy stuff is also happening. It goes back to the disjointed storytelling: I wish we could engage with more than one part of the story instead of just Xaden. But because Violet can't go two seconds without thinking about him, I guess the plot isn't allowed to advance independent of him either.

This is especially unfortunate because Xaden sucks. I hate that man and I'm not going to apologize for it. Once again, everything in this book is derivative of something else, and Xaden was built exclusively to fit into the trope of "male love interest who would burn the world down to make sure the woman he loves is okay." Personally, I hate this concept, because burning the world that Violet lives in down would mean that she also burns, so it doesn't feel like love, just stupidity. (Big spoilers for Iron Flame ahead — last warning.) Xaden was particularly intolerable in this book because of his fall into being a venin. Because he spends the whole book "trying" (poor effort) not to turn, it means he lacks any character motivation outside of being Violet's boyfriend, which makes him an incredibly weak character. And when this weak character is the second main character, it brings down the whole story.

Violet isn't much better. Unfortunately, while she is full of potential to be an interesting and multi-dimensional character, she also sort of falls into just being a romance protagonist. If I go look, I'm certain I'll find "Don't Blame Me" by Taylor Swift on Yarros' inspiration playlist for this book, because taking that song as face value and giving the attributes to a main character would give you Violet. Love has made her crazy! Instead of being a strong heroine and leader, she gets genuinely stupid whenever Xaden is involved, and its never anything that endears me to either of them. They — as characters in a story, not as people — cannot exist without one another. This is why Iron Flame was so bad, and it's why I don't have confidence in the integrity of this series moving forward. A house built on sand doesn't stand when the storm comes.

I know I'm ragging on this book a lot, but I don't want to give it any leniency. I don't think it deserves it: this is an incredibly popular series with a movie deal and a billion special editions of each book. If you're going to milk it for all its worth, I'm going to call out that it's exploitative of the fans. That being said, I obviously didn't hate it entirely. I gave the book 2.5 stars because it was fine. I read it, I'm done with it, and I don't intend to think about it again until the next book is out.

However, I would like to talk about the ending a bit. I'm not going to spoil exactly what happens, but if you are genuinely reading the books, I would recommend not reading this part until you finish.

In the past two books, the whole thing was from Violet's point of view except for one chapter at the end from Xaden's. I think this is fine, and I was expecting it coming into this book. But this time, as we're in the middle of the big battle at the end, Yarros takes us into the mind of three characters: Rhiannon, Imogen, and Xaden. I think it's a cheap way to tell the story. If your main character isn't giving you a full enough ending on her own, then either you need a better main character or you need a better ending. And actually, I think Violet's point of view would've been fine on its own. It would've meant that Yarros had to do some extra unpacking of events that she (and therefore the reader) wasn't privy to at the time, but I think that would've made the whole thing feel more natural. Instead, she decides to inexplicably give us omnipotence, which means Violet is the only one who has any learning to do. You may try to call it dramatic irony, but I think it means that we're actually just setting ourselves up for repetitive exposition in the beginning of the fourth book.

Even more unbelievable than this, though, is the decision to have Violet's memories wiped for 12 whole hours at the end of the book just to give us a cliffhanger. I don't know who approved the decision to use two conflicting storytelling techniques at the end, but it was a bad one. You can't break us from the main character so we know more than her and steal 12 hours from us so that we're in the dark! Doing one of those things would've been enough on its own. But apparently the stupid cliffhanger is just that important. Unfortunately, this proves to me that Yarros either doesn't have a good editor or doesn't have a good sense of storytelling and planning. She will prioritize decisions that warrant an immediate reaction over decisions that would create a better overall story.

And we've still got two more books of it.