penwalla

First off: let's see how many of my predictions were right!

So far, Yarros has managed about 1 meaningful death scene per book: Liam in book 1 and General Sorrengail in book 2. Other characters died, yes, in droves, but none of them mattered. So I'm guessing the same will occur here and she'll save her one decent death scene for the climax again. I say we'll lose another one of Violet's squad members. My guess would be Imogen.
The wards will be raised in Aretia.
Violet and Xaden will get engaged, or at least start talking about marriage.
We will discover that Andarna is the Mary Sue of dragons and has other weird powers.
Yarros will frequently tell us how dangerous venin!Xaden is but nothing bad will actually happen and if it does it will never actually matter.

Damn, I'm good. We got Quinn dying instead of Imogen, but we got Imogen's POV and Mira almost died. Otherwise I was dead on: the wards got raised, Violet and Xaden talked about getting married and then did, Andarna has weird magic powers from being an irid, and Xaden being a venin mattered exactly ONE time (the irids didn't like him) before the end of the book where he lost his shit. And the irids came back to deus ex machina anyway.

This book boggles me.

I have to assume that all the articles about these books being cowritten by editors at Entangled or true. I even kind of believe the AI accusations now. Something has gone very wrong here, because this book is structurally bad. Foundationally bad. It's significantly worse than the first two, magnifying the problems of prior volumes.

I don't understand how this could be published. They sold this book for MONEY.

In no particular order:

1. The romance is hella boring.

Long series with established couples can be tricky to write.

Yarros let Xaden and Violet fall madly in love in book 1, and now she has no idea what to do with them. I haven't researched her back catalog but it wouldn't surprise me to find out she's never written a series where she had to follow a couple past the initial HEA. There's two main conflicts between Xaden and Violet in this book: Xaden's transformation into a venin, and Xaden being her professor.

The first should be the backbone of the book, but is undercut by the fact we don't see serious consequences of Xaden being a venin until the very end of the book. Instead, we get Violet and Xaden having the exact same conversation ad nauseam for fifty-odd chapters. She loves him no matter what. He's pushing her away because he can't control himself. They don't make any progress on this EVER. When Violet's friends find out she's been keeping this secret, none of them are mad for longer than a couple paragraphs and no one actually does anything about it. Xaden never actually harms Violet, the thing he keeps saying he's afraid of doing. Until the very end of the book, he doesn't harm anyone by losing control, and I would bet money that'll get retconned in Book 4.

Also, Violet and Xaden's dialogue is terrible. I think I skipped over this during the recaps, but every character in this book sounds like they went to the same therapist, and that therapist is just a bunch of reddit posts from armchair psychologists in a trenchcoat. Violet and Xaden never say the wrong thing to each other, or misunderstand each other, or lash out. They communicate incessantly. And this is interspersed with Xaden's possessive violet jealous boyfriend schtick, which he has to periodically do because this book relies extremely heavily on evoking popular romantasy tropes, so it feels very weird that Yarros will let Xaden threaten to kill someone out of jealousy but won't let them have arguments where they say mean things to each other.

So conflict 1 (venin!Xaden) is a nothing-burger.

Conflict 2, "Oh no I'm fucking my teacher" is even less of a problem. This is literally not a problem--not only does it never pose an actual problem for the characters in-story, if the reader thinks about it at all they will realize that no one in-story should even care.

I will say it again: Xaden and Violet openly supported and still support a rebellion against the government of Navarre. WHY DO THEY CARE ABOUT THE CODEX AT ALL.

In a romantasy novel, where the romance is supposed to be front and center, having Violet and Xaden bring literally nothing to most of the story is the kiss of death. As we'll talk about next, the romance is supposed to be the part Yarros is good at, so it's all downhill from here.

2. The worldbuilding in this book makes me wish I were illiterate.

To describe the world as "built" implies a level of forethought this book does not deserve. The world of the Empyrean is slopped together. It's so internally inconsistent that the only way to read it is with your brain firmly off, not remembering anything that came before. Otherwise, the sheer mass of contradictions and half-baked ideas will wear your brain to shreds.

How does the magic of this world work? Is it a sentient force that seeks balance? Or is a natural part of the world that is more abundant in some areas than others? Do dragons need magic to live, and if so, how do the irids manage? Are signets reflections of the person's character, or are they not? Are the rebels now part of the Navarre army again, or aren't they? If Navarre is isolationist and has no contact with other nations, how does Aaric speak so many languages fluently? If the silver hair of the dedicates of Dunne is caused by a plant they use, how is Violet's hair still silver decades later if she's not treating it with that plant?

You can't make sense of the world of this book, because it wasn't written sensibly. It's clearly just whatever ideas the author had at that moment they were writing, and I cannot believe that this book had any significant structural editing because surely someone would have noticed that none of it makes sense.

3. These characters are dumb as fuck.

Aaric, the prince of the nation and a character who is supposed to be intelligent, is acting strangely. Instead of considering what he's up to, Violet is briefly mad about his behavior and then just forgets about it. For the rest of the book. Until it comes up again. And when she works out--well, when the plot hands her the revelation--that Aaric is a precog, she clearly knows what a precog is and that it's a possible signet, which begs the question, why the fuck didn't this occur to her sooner?

This is just one example of the book's greater problem, which is that it spoonfeeds Violet the answers to the plot whenever Yarros feels like giving them, and otherwise Violet never fucking does anything with the information she has. A plot mystery will appear and she'll just shrug her shoulders until it's time for her to figure it out, usually by having it explicitly told to her. We keep hearing that Violet is researching the venin, but Violet never figures out one fucking thing about the venin even once. Violet doesn't find the irids--she stumbles onto them after running a completely ineffectual mission to find them. All of Violet's traits are informed. She's supposed to be smart, but we never see her exercise her intelligence on the page. She's supposed to be disabled, but that only matters when Yarros feels like it and never in a substantial way.

And if you were hoping the other characters in the book were worth reading about, I'm sorry to say that this book has way too many characters and barely any development for any of them. Sawyer gets a few chapters where he deals with his disability, but that thread does not get resolved and drops off after he and Violet have one good scene together. No dragon in this book has an arc--even Andarna gets, like, two scenes of development. Instead of locking in on the side characters that matter and using this book's enormous page count to flesh them out, Yarros barely makes use of them at all.

4. What is the plot of this book.

What is the plot of Onyx Storm? Couldn't tell you! Stuff is happening, but none of it matters and most of it doesn't make sense. You could cut massive swathes of the book out and it would make no difference. The sheer volume of names and places and half-formed plot threads make the book drag on and on and on, and Yarros keeps dropping conflicts as soon as they appear, so the end result is a book that goes nowhere until the last minute, when she has to write a dramatic cliffhanger so that people will buy Book 4.

Despite a good chunk of the early book being about a treaty, I still could not tell you what the relationship between the rebels and the Navarre military actually is. Despite multiple plot points apparently hinging on this. It is still not clear to me.

Yarros doesn't know how to write a large stakes political fantasy with this many moving parts.

5. Tension? Not even once.

This book's primary methods of creating tension are having Violet withhold information from the reader despite the book being IN FIRST PERSON and through vague opening quotes.

The quotes are either too vague to be useful or are actively spoiling the book, and every time Violet refuses to think about something just so I, the reader, don't find out what she's plotting, I lose ten years from my life.

Because characters rarely face consequences for their actions, and because conflicts are constantly being introduced and then dropped at random throughout the book, it's very hard for the book to develop any actual suspense. It's hard to get invested in anything when you know it's not going to stick around. Like, remember Aetos, Dain's evil dad? What happened to him? No idea, he just disappears when the book stops needing him. Remember when Violet was worried about being punished for going rogue during her irid-finding island tour? No problem, that gets taken care of offscreen. Remember when Violet was catatonic because Andarna left? Neither do I, she was gone like a week and Violet was up and going like a page later.

You can't make up for this lack of tension by having Violet's brain stop producing thoughts, though Yarros certainly tries.

In conclusion: this book is bad. It's not even worth hatereading, because it's not entertainingly bad, it's just incompetent.

How Can We Fix This?

I have some thoughts.

1. Consequences

This book desperately needs some.

First off, Xaden being a venin has to be a bigger deal than it is in the book. So I think we have two options. Option 1 is that Violet breaks up with him over it. I think this would have been a much better choice than Violet standing by her man. For one, it would have let Xaden's insane pivot from "guy who let himself get scarred 107 times for his comrades" to "guy who would let the world burn for his girfriend of a few months" be an actual insane pivot. It would have recontextualized Xaden's degeneration into a generic Romantasy Shadow Daddy as him succumbing to the venin. And it would have given all Violet and Xaden's yearning some teeth. And it would have forced Violet to focus on the actual plot happening around her instead of on fixing Xaden.

Our other option is to have Violet accept Xaden as venin, but to have him immediately be outed. He should be on the run from his former comrades who are all trying to kill him. Violet should be a pariah for believing in him. This book's preoccupation with following rules when all the characters are rebels who tried to overthrow the government makes much more sense if Violet is trying to keep her head down so she can get away with sending Xaden supplies while he's hiding out, or whatever. Also, this would mean characters would have to express disapproval of Violet instead of just monologuing about how great she is and how in love she and Xaden are 24/7.

The other thing is that Xaden's first act of evil can't be in the final chapters of the book. He needs to have slip ups earlier, and they need to escalate so that Violet has to doubt him as the book progresses. And I think he should get to kill the prince. Not Aaric, the shitty one who was Violet's ex. Killing the heir to the throne would be a huge problem and would create lots of interesting dilemmas. Like, does Violet help him cover this up and then have to watch him and hope he doesn't kill again? Does this add on to the ongoing problems between Tyrrendor and Navarre? It would completely fuck up the mission to find the irids and give it a much more interesting dynamic. Instead of them just going off on their own and then facing no consequences for it, what if Violet has to go on this mission to avoid being investigated for the prince's murder? And she has to convince her squad to go along with it?

Another thing they could have done was have Xaden harm a dragon earlier on in the book. This would have tied in with the whole "dragons are the riders real love" thing the book kept trying to do.

What if Xaden hurt an irid, and Violet had to choose between him and Andarna?

2. Lock in.

This book needed to decide what actually mattered and then spend its page count on those things.

Pick a couple secondary characters and write them some decent subplots, please. Ridoc, Sawyer, Mira...they all had moments where they showed depth, but there was plenty of room in the book they could have been given to have full arcs and actual development. Mira and Violet's conflict could have been built way up so that it wasn't just obviously there to give us the Dunne reveal. "Reveal" as if the reader didn't figure it out chapters ago!

Same thing with the politics. Yarros isn't GRRM or Seth Dickinson, she doesn't understand complex plots, that's fine. Pick two elements of the current plot and then write the whole book around them. I'd say focus on the Navarre-Tyrrendor situation, since that's so closely tied to Xaden already and would give the book a chance to actually explain what's up with the rebels now, and then pick ONE of the island nations and actually give it good development. We do not need four themed islands. No one needs that. Pick one and try to give it an actual culture.

3. Drop the religious stuff.

Yeah, yeah, it was a big part of the book, but it's so poorly executed and so badly set up by the previous books that I think it's not salvageable. Violet is special enough already.

4. If you're going to introduce shocking new elements of magic, let the characters be surprised.

Magic being sentient and balancing itself is contradictory to the previous books, so let it be a contradiction and have the characters actually react to having their world upended. Same things with the venin having signets. If the signets come from the person's true character and yours is the same as a venin's, what does that say about you? That's more interesting than any of this counterpart bullshit we got in this book.

The previous book was heavy on themes of censorship and revisionist history. None of that was in this book, and yet it's full of insane retcons that would have been perfect for continuing on that theme.

BOOK 4 predictions:

All of Xaden's misdeeds will be retconned or explained away or just forgotten in the next one. Probably immediately, within the first couple chapters. He will never face actual consequences, just some mean words from other people at best.

Violet, now married to Xaden, is in charge of Tyrrendor now because Bodhi is a venin and Xaden is also a venin, and she will spend the book angsting about how she's not good enough to lead but will never make a serious mistake. And everyone will assure her she's amazing at it.

When Bodhi reappears, he will be inexplicably evil and will have no coherent reason for turning.

Violet will get super special goddess powers.

Andarna will be back in this book at the start, but the book will keep them reforming their bond for later so that Violet has something else to angst about.

This book will introduce the idea of Violet and Xaden having a child. Possibly she'll get pregnant.

All right...what should I hateread next?