CBR18 Book 46: "Dominion" by Jean Kwok

Page count: 448 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR18 Bingo: 26 (published this year. This month, in fact)

Thank you to G.P. Putnam's Sons and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book is on sale now.

Rubi is an azure, a group of displaced and badly treated refugees. In this fantasy world, there are four dominions, each with its own specialities. There is the Azure Dragon dominion, which can control plants and all things growing, and many of their people can shapeshift into animals; the Scarlet Phoenix dominion, which controls fire; the Silver Tyger (yes, that's how they spell the name of the magical animal) dominion, which can manipulate metal; and the Onyx Tortoise dominion, which controls water and ice. The various dominions also seem to have very different views on gender equality. The Scarlet Dominion is fully matriarchal; in the Azure Dominion, men and women seem to have been treated as equals; in the Silver Dominion, there is a strong bent towards misogyny, with the current king being extremely dismissive of his only child, a daughter. Finally, in the Onyx Dominion, women are entirely subservient to men, and their magic is used to fuel the male wielders. 

The azures became refugees and had to shelter among the other three dominions after something known as the Annihilation, which was supposed to be a joyous and special event, when the Crown Prince of the Azure Dominion wed the Crown Princess of the Scarlet Dominion in a rare love match. However, demons poured forth from the ground, killing and/or devouring a lot of the guests, including the bride, the Scarlet Crown Princess, and the King of the Onyx Dominion. The whole Azure royal family disappeared and is believed to also have been devoured by the demons. Because of this, all cross-dominion alliances are considered an impossibility, and the Azure people who have had to flee to other parts of the world are mostly seen as second-class citizens and set to do all the hardest jobs. 

Rubi lives in the woods with her foster mum. She was orphaned when fleeing from the Annihilation and has more or less total amnesia. Occasionally she has dreams where a woman's voice sings her a song with a prophecy, but she can never remember the woman's face when she wakes up. Rubi runs into Blake Axefire (yes, that's his name), also known as the Ambush Master, the king's chief enforcer, when he is in the woods near the cabin where she lives, looking for an escaped tyger. When trying to defend herself from said tyger, Rubi stabs it and is promptly arrested because it is a deadly offence to injure one of the king's magical tygers. Not only that, the tyger is basically the queen tyger, the only adult female able to bear cubs. The last queen tyger died after its mate died (they're bonded for life and can't live without their mate), along with its bonded rider, Blake's twin brother Zayden (yes, also that name) during the Annihilation. 

But of course, Rubi is our super special romantasy heroine, so despite the fact that azures can't bond with tygers, and that no female tyger has bonded with anyone for centuries, Flame, the current queen tyger, bonds with her. This does not sit well with a whole bunch of people, including the king, his bruthish nephew and heir, Ire, or the princess, Malissa. They pretty much all want Rubi killed, so Flame can bond with someone else. But queen tyger makes it very clear that she'll refuse to mate and have tyger babies if they kill her chosen mate, so now Rubi has to train to be a fighter with the elite silver tyger riders.

As if that wasn't enough, a divine messenger appears and announces that the Annihilation will seem like a child's birthday party unless all the various Dominions gather a band of champions each and work together to stop a potential apocalyptic event. Despite their differences and enmities, it's very important that all four Dominions are equally represented. There's a big public challenge about it, and obviously Rubi is one of the chosen warriors. So is her best friend, Quinn, who can shapeshift into a wolf. Rubi not only has amnesia, but she also seems to have very weak magic and is not able to shapeshift.

Also, Blake doesn't hate her at all, all his grumpiness at the beginning is apparently because he was trying to fight his attraction to her. He loves her, and Jace, the Captain of the King's guard, seems to be very into her as well. 

I don't like the term romantasy. I don't particularly like the new publishing trend that means so many of these books get churned out, and all feel like they are following the same checklist. In November 2024, my bookclub read Fourth Wing, which felt like it owed a LOT of debts to A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (heck, this entire sub-genre owes its popularity to Sarah J. Maas and her books. Most of them even have titles along the lines of "A noun of nouns and nouns".) This book had so many tropes from both of these books. Rubi injures a magical creature and is taken away by a brooding man because of it. Her life will never be the same. There is a super special girl who magically and implausibly bonds with the most impressive of all the magical animals. There's a tortured guy with a very dumb name who is obviously crazy about the heroine.

I know a lot of female authors who started writing about a decade or two ago were pretty much forced to market their books as young adult to get them sold, complete with being persuaded to insert love triangles into the plot because that was what sold back then. This felt like the opposite, a YA fantasy where the author just inserted a bunch of sex scenes in the second half of the book because romantasy has to have spicy scenes and fade to black just won't cut it. 

This book felt so derivative at first, and by about 40%, I decided that if the plot hadn't improved by the halfway point, I was going to just skip to the end and read the final chapters to see what happened. As it turns out, it did get a bit better in the second half, but a lot of the plot was still quite predictable, and oh so tropey. I was all set to give this book 3.5 stars, but then in the final three chapters or so, the author suddenly revealed a bunch of stuff that was surprising enough that I was forced to reevaluate my opinion and went from not being very bothered about seeing where this series is going, to suddenly being quite intrigued. Unfortunately, the twists came a bit too late to save my overall opinion of the book. I can't bring myself to rate something 3.75, though, so a grudging upgrade to 4 full stars it gets. I most likely will read the next book in the series, but I will get it from the library, unless I can score another ARC. 

Judging a book by its cover:

Not going to lie, the cover was one of the things that made me request this ARC. The defiant posture of the girl, the blue hair and swirling fabric (which I now know are Rubi's ribbons). The hint of the tiger in the background. The cover intrigued me, so well done, cover designers. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR16 Book 66: "Fourth Wing" by Rebecca Yarros

Page count: 561 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Smash (romantasy - I want it on record that I hate this term, by the way)

Since this has been a huge success and had lots of attention on the TikToks and the like, I'm not even sure if I need to give much of a plot summary, but here goes:

All her life, Violet Sorrengail has wanted to become a Scribe, like her father. However, her mother, a commanding general of the army of Navarre (the fictional country this is set in) will not accept that any child of hers become anything but a dragon rider. Violet's older sister is a dragon rider, Violet's older brother was a dragon rider (until he tragically died), and so Violet also has to join the most insanely dangerous quadrant of the Basgiath war college, even though she's only had about six months since her mother ordered her to change her mind, and she's disabled to boot, so weaker and much more breakable than most of the ruthless candidates surrounding her. 

Violet survives the perilous first task (apparently more than sixty people died before even getting into the college - is that really a good way to run a school?) and now has to stay alive in a literally lethally competitive environment. The lucky first years who survive, may be lucky enough to bond with a dragon and be granted exciting magical powers as a result. Violet has to use all her cunning and guile to survive among her more vicious peers, and there are a lot of people who want her dead, including the imposing Xaden Riorson, son of the man her mother personally executed after a failed rebellion. He and a number of other young family members of rebels are at the school because enrolling (and most likely being killed) was the only option given to them to ensure their survival. 

Violet does make friends, and surprising everyone, survives long enough to get a chance at bonding a dragon. Once that ordeal is over (and she's once again nearly killed), it becomes impossible for her to avoid Xaden any longer, since their dragons are mated, and that means that if something happens to either of them, the other one dies because of the bond bestowed by their dragons. So that's fun. Of course, Xaden might hate her mum, but he is undeniably very hot. Despite having every reason for wanting her dead and having lots of opportunities to get her killed, Xaden instead seems amused by Violet, even sparring with her and challenging her - it's all very confusing.

There is danger facing the borders of Navarre, and fewer dragon riders every year to deal with it. It becomes clear during Violet's first year at Basgiath that the country's leadership are hiding things and downplaying the seriousness of the attacks on border villages. Will Violet survive her first year at war college only to find herself thrust into an actual war?

For quite a while, I was usure about reading Fourth Wing because of all the hype on TikTok. Colleen Hoover is beloved on BookTok, and what little I tried of one of her books quickly made it clear that those books are not for me. So I was a bit sceptical. Then my friend Ashley read it last year and made this fun video about the experience. Generally, if Ashley likes a book, I will too (there are exceptions, but they are usually hard sci-fi or horror books).

While I don't think Rebecca Yarros and her dragon romantasy has gotten lots of readers hooked, even the ones who don't tend to read speculative fiction, I don't think she's anywhere near Twilight-levels of popularity and obsession. Because I myself was deeply hooked on the Twilight saga back in the day, and you still can't entirely convince me that the pages of those books weren't laced with crack, removing all critical faculties of the reader and making them impossible to put down. 

Did Fourth Wing hook me as powerfully? No, but I can absolutely see why it's become so popular. I also see why it's been widely criticised, because there are aspects of the world building that just do not make a lick of sense. Violet is a better heroine than Bella Swan, mainly because she has some agency, and the plot doesn't just happen to her. But she's also clearly extra super speshul and manages things no one seems to have done before - for why? Who knows? The plot requires it to be that way. Of course there is a love triangle, because these books seem to always have to have one. There's Violet, our plucky heroine, there's Dain, her childhood best friend, who has pretty thoroughly friend-zoned her their entire life, but now seems convinced (despite repeated proof of the opposite) that Violet is too fragile and weak to survive to become a dragon rider, and keeps wanting to smuggle her into the Scribe's quarter. No points for guessing who candidate number three is - if there is a dark, brooding, probably dangerous dude, who your entire surviving family has warned you to stay away from, that's clearly going to be the one guy who's bones you really want to jump. Xaden also gets major points for never underestimating Violet, and instead of coddling her, encourages her to get better, stronger and sneakier. 

While Twilight is YA and Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon who's all about no hanky-panky before marriage  (and let's not forget, if you do have sex, you'll get immediately pregnant with a lifeforce-sucking parasite and literally die giving birth to it), Fourth Wing is aimed at a somewhat older audience, and by the time Violet makes up her mind about which third of the love triangle she prefers (I'm sure you couldn't possibly guess who she picks), there are some pretty graphic sex scenes. Encindiary, one might say. As someone who read a whole lot of smut as a teenager, I don't see a problem with YA readers reading these (or Sarah J Maas or a bunch of other books that seem to be shelved in the YA sections of bookstores despite dealing with much heavier themes). But some people might be shocked, so fair warning. 

As well as having a central premise that just does not make sense Seriously, why kill off most of your promising young people - some of them before they've even made it INTO the school? If your country is fighting a decades-long war, you are going to want as many able-bodied fighters as possible. So only the best can become dragon riders? Fair enough, but why do pretty much all challenges have to be succeed or die? Why not have the ones who fail challenges moved to one of the other three sections of the war college, possibly to start at the bottom, but at least given a chance to be a valuable member of the fighting force. It's quite clear that once the first-years bond with a dragon and start trying to ride on them, a whole bunch of them die anyway. Why kill off  the majority of them before they get to that point and natural selection apparently kicks in? It's maddening, people!

This is my real life bookclub's pick for November, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion. I hope a whole bunch of people show up, and I suspect there will be many spirited opinions. I'm also glad I waited long enough to read this that third and final book in the series is just around the corner. It's being released in January, so I think I'll wait for December to read book 2 (which I have heard is extremely slow-going in the first half, but gets better towards the end). I'm also glad I liked it because my friend Des took my book to a convention and got it signed and personalised by Rebecca Yarros, so it would suck if I hated it. 

Judging a book by its cover: Despite this book only coming out in 2023, it already seems to have a huge amount of alternate covers, most of them in black and gold. While the hardback is golden with black patterns, I prefer my paperback in matte black, with the pattern in gold and white. Much prettier. 

Crossposted on Cannonballl Read