Kingdom of Readers

Hopefully, you can guess which book for me was my first let down, but if not this is your warning! 🚨SPOILTER ALERT AHEAD FOR ONYX STORM by Rebecca Yarros🚨

First of all, what the f*** did I just read? Second of all… if you’ve seen all the memes about being confused for the first 50 pages… they weren’t exaggerating. As someone who reread Fourth Wing (and glanced over Iron Flame before looking up a detailed summary online), I was still lost.

Yarros opens the book by introducing a whole new cast of characters and an entire political system we know nothing about. I mean, I get that each book has to build on the world, but this particular addition was very far off from having enough context.

 

WHERE IS THE SUBSTANCE!?

There were some surprising moments that made me go, “OMG!” — only to follow up with, “Wait, what was the point of that?”

Case in point: Xaden’s mom. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF INTRODUCING HER? The entire chapter felt like a waste of space. Violet and her squad go traipsing around to an isle where they coincidentally run into Xaden’s estranged mother.

You know the mother who abandoned the family when Xaden was 10 and is now married to one of the only reasons the squad went to the isle in the first place? Yeah, that mother. Turns out that she is married to one of the three people who will make a decision on whether to ally with the Continent in the war.

After this bombshell, the scene evolves into a dinner scene that almost gets Garrick kills, but it doesn’t move the plot forward at all. Violet and her squad don’t form an alliance, Xaden and his mom barely talk, and no one leaves with any answers. The chapter ends, and it feels like it never had to be there in the first place.

And don’t even get me started on Trager. He’s introduced as some random side character who gives Cat a potential love interest… just to be killed off. So again… WHAT WAS THE POINT??

WHERE IS THE DEPTH??

Each isle in this book felt like a random stop on a checklist, and it became exhausting. Visit ___, check. Visit _____, check. *Insert Xaden brooding*, check.

The setting changes with each chapter, so there’s no world-building depth to make these places feel real. And again, once they leave an isle and the chapter ends, it really starts to feel like it had never been there to begin with. Nothing felt cohesive with new questions arrising each page and no answers.

WHERE ARE THE BELOVED CHARACTERS?!

The focus on all of the random new characters seems to have come at the expense of the ones I actually care about. Rhiannon barely shows up, Dain is there the whole time, but is he?? and Sloane, well, she’s just written in on a whim every once in a while, to just remind us she won’t wield… this seems to be a common occurrence, but what. is. the. point.

Then, there’s Xaden. He really started to rub me the wrong way. Sure, we love a protective MC, and I get that we’re supposed to see him fall into a darker version of himself, but his actions stifle Violet’s independence.

A perfect example is on page 154 when he confronts Halden, a past love interest of Violet’s, by practically throwing him into a wall. Xaden says something like: “I don’t control her and never will,” Yet throwing someone into a wall to stop him from touching your girlfriend is not freedom, that’s possessiveness.

The Let Down

Honestly, the biggest issue I have with Onyx Storm, and what draws all of these points together, is how much unnecessary fluff there is.

If Yarros didn’t want to delve into the world building of the isles or the new characters more, she should have condensed the isle-searching to one chapter and focused on the old characters. Instead, we are left with more questions than answers, and by the time I hit the last 100 pages, I was just waiting for something to give me a payoff.

Thankfully, the last 60 pages caught my attention & the cliffhanger at the end of the book was suspenseful enough. 

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but for me, this book feels rushed and bloated. I don’t get why the series was extended to five books, and at this point, it feels like a mistake. A tight trilogy could have worked much better, and I wish we had gotten the same depth of story as the first 2 books.

As it stands, this one’s a 2 to 2.5-star read for me. Definitely the first big letdown of 2025.

My Unanswered Questions

Just for giggles

1. Why did Violet’s parents dedicate her?? And why didn’t Mira tell Violet right away that she learned she had been? 
2. What was the comment on page 259 about Violet smelling parchment about? And what about when she thought she saw the eyes of that statue light up?
3. Dragon’s actually gift their human’s their signet?? If not why are the irids under the impression they do??
4. When the Dragons are flying from the last isle to the isle they find the irids on, there is no magic?? Why would the magic disappear – does it not exist over water??
5. Was Yarros rushed in the writing of this book too much? Should this series really be 5 books instead of the 3 already planned?