Iron Flame: Empyrean, Book 2

Rogue1994

Top tier fantasy at its finest, kind of

"Iron Flame Before i start this review, i’m going to assume if you’re looking at the second book, you’ve read the first so there will be spoilers from the first book, fair warning. For starters the overall story of Iron Flame is very well written, with plenty of adventure, battle, suspense, and action the whole way through. However some parts this “second year around” feel lack luster and rushed through. Parts that were major focal points in the first book like the parapet, the gauntlet, and threshing that took a whole chapter or chapters to get through, only get a couple of pages this time and it lessens the effect of the event. Character development is well done in this book, picking up right where the last book dropped off so there isn’t a lot of “gray area” in that transition for the characters. New characters come in to play and become favorites with enough backstory to keep them interesting. The negatives for this story however kind of fall in the same lane as the last book. All the romantic scenes between Violet and Xaden just feel overdone and obnoxious to the point you want to skip pages just to get back to the actual story. There is only so many times someone can obsesses over a certain body part, “relic”, or feature before it gets to the point of annoyance. They literally take what should be 3 pages of sex scene, and stretch it out for full length chapters because we can’t get over how beautiful someone’s hair is, or how etched their muscle’s are. One of the cardinal sins of writing is overuse of repetition, and the sex scenes just go over the top with it. Overall, if you can get through small annoyances of reading the same thing over and over again when it cones to the intimate scenes, the story itself is fantastic and well written. ["

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April 30, 2026 Verified Purchase

Lindsi @ Do You Dog-ear?

"Love, betrayal, unexpected plot twists, new friends..."

"I still haven't reviewed Fourth Wing, but decided to go ahead and write this one while the story was still fresh on my mind. I was already late to the game with this series, but I put myself on the waiting list for an audiobook at my library as soon as I was able to after falling in love with these characters during Fourth Wing. Additionally, Rebecca Soler is one of my absolute favorite narrators and she does an amazing job with this series. Yarros not only makes me fall in love with Violet and Xaden, but every secondary character is beloved as well. Losing any of them would be devasting to my heart, so that final battle in Iron Flame had my pulse racing right along with Violet's. I was already worried about finishing the book since everyone said they literally stared at a wall for 20 minutes afterwards, but I still wasn't expecting the cliffhanger we're left with. Haven't we been through enough by now? I will say that I didn't like how long it took Violent and Xaden to work through their issues. A lack of communication between characters is a huge turn off for me in books, especially when they're romantically involved. Violet knew who he was before she fell in love with him, yet she made demands and put expectations on him that were a bit unfair. She didn't completely trust him because he wouldn't tell her everything, but everyone in this series has secrets, including her. She kept demanding total honesty and full disclosure despite other lives being at risk if she knew. Yarros managed to address these issues in a way that wasn't cringeworthy, so at least that aspect of the book was tolerable and didn't ruin everything else for me. The dragons are still my favorite part of these books. I love their sarcasm and menacing attitudes, especially when directed towards their own riders. Their personalities are perfection. Adolescent Adarna is an absolute delight to read about, and her getting on Tairn's nerves never fails to make me smile. I'm really happy we learned more about them in Iron Flame because so much is still a mystery. Love, betrayal, unexpected plot twists, new friends and frenemies, dragons and gryphons, riders and flyers, war, loss - Iron Flame has all that and more. I highly recommend this series if you enjoy fantasy and fast-paced adventure stories. (★★★★★) ["

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December 30, 2023 Verified Purchase

Diana The Book Nerd

A fantastic story with masterful use of technique, an intricate plot, and fascinating characters!

"Iron Flame (The Empyrean Book 2)Kindle Edition by Rebecca Yarros(Author) I blame Anne McCaffrey for my love of dragons and their riders. Rebecca Yarros, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons had a lot to live up to, in fact, the entirety of Pern! And Ms. Yarros does live up to Ms. McCaffrey. Where, at times, the first book in the Empyrean felt like a young adult book that had spice added in to move it from the young adult shelf, Iron Flame is fully rooted in adult fantasy, with just the right amount of spice and the perfect measure of angst and pathos. The relationship between Violet and Xaden sits in the center of the story, but there is so much more. We have siblings with a reason for vengeance, a hidden royal heir, jealous love rivals, and a race for a magical solution. It's all in there. All of the feels and all of the tension. The only issue I had was that about ¼ of the book could have been shaved. In the realm of fantasy and fantasy romance, many authors seem to be in a race to see who can write the longest book. Yes, SJM, JLA, and now Ms. Yarros, I am looking at all of you. Apparently, they are all racing to take the tile of the biggest book away from the Giga Codex. That said, I am in love with the world that Ms. Yarros has created. It feels very concrete, as if I could smell the dust on the trails that the dragons and the griffins climb, the sweat under the flight leathers, and the spice of the lust that seems to be in the air. It is a real world, tangible, and fascinating. Ms. Yarros is the new queen of the Shadow Daddy (if you don't know, go look it up). Xaden is not morally grey, so much as he is morally flexible. He is willing to burn the world... heck, he'd burn the universe for Violet, but he is also full of honor and strength. Violet is not the paragon of virtue or the slightly insane fantasy heroine we are used to. She is very clearly, a fighter – not only of her very real enemies, but also the illness that she must overcome every day to be a rider. One of the stand out part of Iron Flame is the dialogue. Ms. Yarros is a master of using dialogue to move the story along and to further character development effortlessly. Unless the reader takes a step back from the story (which is as difficult as climbing Everest barefoot!), it isn't easy to see the masterful techniques she utitlizes. The plot,which at times (as I said before), is a bit overloaded, moves along as fast is possible in this height of book! To be completely honest, I received this book as a gift (the hardback) from the husband, and also borrowed it from KU when it was available, because I needed them both to finish. If Fourth Wing lived up to the hype, Iron Flame went beyond the hype into a completely different universe! Complete with a masterful use of technique, a beautifully built world, and an intricate woven plot, Iron Flame, in fact the entire Empyrean series, is a modern classic that will go down in literary history with the Lord of the Rings, the Dragon Riders of Pern, and the Witchworld stories. 4.75 stars out of 5 (a .25 deduction because some of the book could have been shaved) rounded up to 4 stars out of 5 ["

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November 15, 2024 Verified Purchase