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From Goodreads:
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away … because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter — like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda — because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Rated: DIRT. The author says in a note at the beginning of Fourth Wing that it includes elements of war, battle, hand-to-hand combat, blood, intense violence, brutal injuries, death, poisoning, graphic language, and sexual activities that are shown on the page. She says “readers who may be sensitive to these things, take note.” There are 5 uses of strong profanity in the first chapter, as well as more instances of moderate and mild profanity. Many of the blurbs from other authors mention that it’s “sexy” and “spicy.” So we can be certain the author means what she says in her note.
Note from Cathy: I would have preferred to make this a Rapid Rating, because this post is really more along those lines. Compared to the earlier days of this site — when I only had hard copies of books, so I had to have a “High/DNF” option (which I christened “DIRT”) — now, I can get almost everything in e-form. I like being able to scan an entire ebook for signs of various types of content to provide more comprehensive information without reading every book out there. But the queue I was waiting in at my library to get the Kindle copy of this book was ridiculously long, which would mean I wouldn’t get this information out to you readers for a very long time. Because Amazon is providing a sample from the beginning of the book, I was able do this quickly. So this is a DIRT-Rapid Rating combo, in essence.
