Fourth Wing review: heat level and tropes

Fourth Wing is a slow burn with two open-door scenes and a war college built to kill its students. Heat 3 of 5. Enemies to lovers, with the proximity locked in early. Adult shelf. If that is what you came for, buy it.

I sold rings for eleven years at a kiosk in a mall walkway. The thing I learned first was that the case does the selling. You light it from underneath, you keep the good piece two millimeters behind the glass, and people stop walking.

Rebecca Yarros knows how to light a case.

The cover promises dragons, a war school and a man she should not want

The setup, through the first act and no further. Violet Sorrengail was raised to be a scribe. Her mother, General Lilith Sorrengail, sends her into the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College instead. Violet lands in Fourth Wing, under the command of Xaden Riorson, a third-year whose father led the rebellion. Cadets who survive long enough try to bond a dragon at the Threshing. Plenty don't make it that far.

One blurb, four books' worth of promise: romance, fantasy, school story, survival story. Red Tower Books, a new Entangled imprint at the time, put it out on May 2, 2023 as its launch title, with a first print run of 350,000 announced in advance. The book had to carry the whole sign on its back.

Where it keeps the promise

The proximity is airtight, and it is on the page before anything else. She is in his wing. He outranks her. That is the requirement for forced proximity on my tag: the reason they can't leave has to be real and has to come first. Yarros front-loads it and never lets the door swing open.

The enemies half holds too. His father led the rebellion. Her mother executed him. He has every reason to watch her, and she knows it. Every scene they share has that second thing in the room. Nobody at my counter ever said the true thing either. They talked about the setting and the price. These two talk about training and rank, and the reader hears the rest.

And the slow burn is a display case. Yarros keeps it under glass for a long, long time. By the time they touch, the reader has been coming back every Friday with twenty dollars for most of the book. That is layaway. You know the ring comes out of the case eventually. You keep coming back for the Fridays, and Yarros sells the Fridays harder than anything else in the book.

The dragons earn their place on the cover. I came for the romance and I stayed up late for a dragon.

Where it does not

The heat is a 3 on my scale, and I want to be exact about why, because the tag is the one fact you can't get back after you buy.

On this site a 3 means "Open door. The scenes are on the page." A 4 means explicit, with every scene moving the plot. A 5 means explicit and frequent. Fourth Wing puts its scenes on the page and doesn't cut away. Common Sense Media describes explicit sex scenes, "some several pages long." That clears a 3 easily. The same review says that "with slightly less-explicit sex scenes," the book could have been marketed as YA. Read that as a craft note. If you can turn the scenes down and the book still stands, they are not carrying the plot, and a 4 on my tag means every scene carries it. And The Mary Sue's chapter guide names only two chapters where it goes past kissing, 30 and 32, in a book Wikipedia lists at 512 pages. Two scenes in that much war college is nowhere near a 5.

So it gets a 3. The scenes are open-door and hot enough to blush at. They are also the part you could lift out.

I'm fine with that. I'm less fine with what it does to the middle. The school story gets more pages than the love story, and if you bought it for the love story you will feel the wait in your thumb.

My other complaint is the contract I care about most. Spoiler for the shape of the ending, nothing in it: this is book one of a series, and the romance doesn't close here. It hands you to the next book. A layaway customer knows when her ring comes out of the case. Fourth Wing doesn't tell you the date. The ending is still coming. You pay for it in another damn volume.

Readers ask

Which is spicier, ACOTAR or Fourth Wing?

Book one against book one, Fourth Wing. Common Sense Media calls the sex in A Court of Thorns and Roses "usually more titillating than graphic," and calls Fourth Wing's explicit. Sequels get their own tags.

Can a 14 year old read Fourth Wing?

I wouldn't hand it to one. It is an adult book with explicit sex, gore and a lot of dead cadets. Common Sense Media rates it 16 and up and lists the publisher's recommended ages as 16 to 18. That review also says that with slightly less explicit sex scenes it could have been marketed as YA, which tells you where the line is. If you are the parent, read the two scenes yourself first and decide.

Is chapter 22 of Fourth Wing spicy?

The Mary Sue's chapter guide says chapter 22 "may only contain a kiss." It puts the scenes that go further at chapters 30 and 32. A chapter that stops at a kiss is a 1 on my tag: kissing on the page, door closed on the rest.

Is Fourth Wing or Iron Flame more spicy?

Iron Flame, going by Common Sense Media. It rates Iron Flame 17 and up against Fourth Wing's 16, calls it "sex-heavy," and says the couple "has sex a handful of times." The same review says the sequel skips the ramp-up the first book had, so the scenes "feel like a requirement being met."

Who should read it

Read it if you like your romance under glass for most of a book and don't mind a dragon in the room while you wait. A school where students die in training should sound like a good weekend to you, and you should already be planning on book two.

Skip it if you want a 5, or if you need the ending in your hands when you close the cover.

Sources, opened 1 November 2026: Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing page for the blurb and the author's own content warnings; Common Sense Media's reviews of Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and A Court of Thorns and Roses; The Mary Sue, "Let's Talk About the Spiciest Chapters in 'Fourth Wing'" (Rianna de Bono-Smith, 29 March 2024); Publishers Weekly on the Red Tower Books launch; Wikipedia's Fourth Wing article for the first-act setup and page count. The heat scale is this site's own.