In the third book in the series, the significant romantasy elements take a back seat to quests for knowledge and cures, attempts to locate a species of dragon, and a large-scale, high-stakes conflict involving action-packed battles and scheming.
Violet Sorrengail has been training as a dragon rider for 18 months at Basgiath War College, but a real-life, high-stakes battle is coming, and she'll need to find out what she's made of in the life-and-death conflict that is certain to affect everything and everyone she knows.
She and her fellow riders set out on an unsanctioned quest to faraway lands to try to secure allies, armies, and knowledge. But the mysteries surrounding the power of their enemies, her own dragon, and the future of her beloved Xaden threaten to upend everything.
I appreciated the continued, if brief, references to Violet's chronic illness and accommodations, which were introduced and highlighted in book one of the series. I also liked the increased focus on large-scale conflict and strategies, the search for knowledge (about dragons, a cure for Xaden's condition, and Violet's own fate), and the increased page time spent on Violet's relationship with her siblings.
There were a handful of the now-familiar, highly specific Yarros sex scenes involving detailed logistics of particular body parts and passionate comments between Violet and Xaden about how superlative the experience is. What I found most distracting in this book, as in the first two, is the heightened drama around their relationship and their blind commitment to what feels like an increasingly broken situation. They endanger their teams, their communities, and their dragons--which are bound to them for life--as well as their own lives. This makes the angsty romance at the heart of the book feel like reckless ridiculousness rather than a devotion worth striving for, and Violet and Xaden's blind dedication to each other feels toxically obsessive.
Dramatic declarations abound, often indicating their disturbing inability to be on their own and their dogged dedication to their destructive pairing; one example reads “I’m jealous of the armor that holds you when I can’t, the sheets on your bed that caress your skin every night, and the blades that feel your hands.” Hmmm.
On a more minor note, the tendency of Violet and Xaden to call each other "Love" feels like a middle-aged Britishism. And I continue to feel that it's lazy to rely so frequently on "f*ck" and "f*cking" to indicate passion or emphasis.
This installment of the series offered less page time to the dramaaaatic elements, but there's no denying that this series is romantasy--and for me, the romantasy pieces are the least intriguing elements. I'm in this story for the teamwork, vengeance, friendship, quests, danger, strategy, character conflict, and dragons.
The urgent search for a cure for Xaden takes an oddly backseat position for much of the book, and the loss of a key dragon to another community is sudden, halfheartedly heartbreaking, then glossed over for much of the book. The ending leaves us on another cliffhanger and sets up potentially intriguing, mysterious conflicts for book four.
I listened to Onyx Storm as an audiobook.
More dragon stories
You can click here for my review of Fourth Wing and here for my Bossy take on Iron Flame.
And for Bossy reviews of other books about dragons, you can click here.
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