"|| 2.0 stars ||

Well, damn. This was incredibly disappointing...
I don’t even really know where to start with this review, because I feel like I have so many complaints.

First and foremost, let’s start with one of the book’s most glaring issues: the writing was genuinely bad. It’s as plain and simple as that. This whole thing dragged like crazy and I was just so bored most of the time. Not only that, the writing was also painfully shallow. Nothing and no one had depth: all of the characters were completely one-dimensional and the plot failed to be interesting or engaging in any way.

Speaking of the characters, let’s go on with my complaints by talking about our failure of a main character. I don’t know what happened to Violet between this one and the previous book, but I don’t recognize her whatsoever. She used to be the perfect balance of kind and bad-ass with a clever and sharp mind to boot! But now this girl we all knew and loved disappeared completely and instead we got this whiny, insecure idiot without a single rational thought going on inside that annoying brain of hers. I suddenly couldn’t stand her anymore!
Same goes for Xaden: he suffered from major character assassination as well. He used to be strong, smart, mysterious, intriguing, and swoony as hell, but that was all gone now. Xaden turned into the most flat character ever, and he had no depth whatsoever. He truly felt like a robot to me, and I lost all interest in him. He is gone for most of the book, and at first I really missed his presence, but after a while, I was just bored every time he came on page, because I knew he would be the same repetitive and annoying character he was during all his other scenes, so I kind of didn’t care anymore if he was gone or not.

The fact that both Violet and Xaden turned into insufferable characters is probably a big reason as to why their romance was terrible in this book too. First of all, after the end of the first book I needed to get some groveling from Xaden, but did we get that here? No. Not even for a second. Xaden wasn’t sorry, he wasn’t regretful, he wasn’t trying to earn back Violet’s trust. No. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t even fight for Violet to forgive him. He was just... waiting. Not lifting a single finger to get back the woman he supposedly loves. He was so cocky in knowing that Violet would crawl back to him anyway that he refused to do anything to speed up the process. He just waited. And I guess he was right, because our spine-less heroine did indeed take him back without getting anything in return: no promises, no trust. Just nothing.
Which obviously leads to a very unhealthy relationship between them where they don’t trust each other and in which they refuse to communicate. EVER. All they do is be horny and have sex, but they never actually talk anymore. They don’t confide in each other and neither do they let themselves fully open up to the other. Their entire relationship was just shallow, boring and irritating. I no longer liked anything about it. And then we even got some goddamn other woman drama, and my patience just vanished! I hated it.

Now, when it comes to the side characters I don’t even know where to begin, because I feel like none of them were written well or with any depth to them. It’s like the author could never seem to focus on more than a few characters at the same time, so whenever she wanted to pay attention to one side character, all the other side characters just fell away. For example: at the beginning of this book we have quite a lot of focus on Imogen, and I was really seeing some amazing progress between her and Violet. I thought I saw the start of a beautiful friendship forming between them. But then, the moment Rhiannon started coming back into the fold (after being ignored in the first part), Imogen completely fell away again and her relationship with Violet never picked up. It’s like the author couldn’t handle Violet having more than one close female friend; she couldn’t focus on both at the same time. And therefore, neither Imogen or Rhiannon ever truly felt like friends to Violet because they were often suddenly ignored in her inner monologue or in the story. They were more like decoration, like tools to further the story along. Thus, none of Violet’s friends ever feel like real characters on their own..

I loved the dragons in the first book; they were my favourite part of the entire book. But now, I couldn’t care less. Tairn used to be this sassy, grumpy dad-type, but now he was just a flat, monotone character with no real personality. Everything he said was repetitive, and his entire character just seemed way too simple and lacking any sort of depth. When it came to Andarna, I genuinely think her entire character was butchered. She used to be this cute and precious little baby, and now she turned into someone annoying, bitchy and arrogant without any meaningful connection to Violet. She was like an entitled teenager, and there’s a reason why nobody likes those.

Of course, there were also other characters of whom I was really looking forward to seeing their story develop, but I didn’t get anything remotely satisfying when it came to them. Liam’s sister was only in a few scenes and in most of them she was just flat-out exasperating; everything about her character was anti-climactic.
More importantly however, I feel like Dain just got completely ignored during this entire book. He used to be Violet’s best friend for such a long time and after it is revealed he didn’t even really do anything to betray her, Violet doesn’t remotely seem to care?? She doesn’t think about him and she doesn’t give him the time of day... she sort of forgives him but not really?? It was so weakly developed and I honestly expected more. It was, once again, very anti-climactic.

Long story short, the only reason I somewhat enjoyed this book, and why I even finished it, is because I still felt a semblance of attachment to the story and these characters after book one, but even that wasn’t enough to keep me engaged for long enough. I couldn’t help but skim near the end of this book, because I was just so bored. I genuinely didn’t care anymore, and this book was just way too long for no reason. All in all, this was one big disappointment to me.


'The Empyrean' series:
1. Fourth Wing - 4.5 stars
2. Iron Flame - 2.0 stars
3. Onyx Storm - 2.5 stars"