I think that this book was ultimately just too formulaic. I felt like I was just rereading the first book. Yarros even tried to replicate the whole enemies to lovers vibe, which was annoying given that the characters were already lovers. On that note, Violet just annoyed me in this one. Many of her choices seemed to exist only to drive the plot, rather than because of her characterization. Despite the lack of growth for Violet and Xaden, I did love to see some of the other characters really grow into their own in this book. Some of them truly took me by surprise. I wish Yarros had focused a little more on other characters instead of rehashing the same things over and over again in Violet’s head. And speaking of rehashing—there were a few too many action scenes in this for me. It felt repetitive and made the book drag out for longer than it needed to be. And despite the high stakes, I didn’t feel the tension that they deserve. Violet never really fails at anything, and it starts to feel too easy at a certain point. The series definitely has interesting worldbuilding and concepts but I don’t think it’s executed as well as it could be. 

I keep trying to read critically so all of these books won’t be five stars, but I’m a hopeless fan… Even the familiar tropes have a fresh spin on them, and I still couldn’t prepare myself for the avalanche at the end!

There's always another secret to keep me guessing, and I'm looking forward to more ethical questions about mind manipulation... It definitely helps that the audiobook captures the subtlety of an unreliable narrator and the excitement of the action (and the "action")! I highly recommend running with your dog while listening to this; I even named my cat Violet!

Holy shit! So good!! I cannot believe how much happened in this book. I loved that we got to see the characters working as a team more in this book and got to dig into relationships and interactions more. I did feel like it was a little bit long but honestly I'm not complaining since I loved reading all of it. LIVING for the betrayals and the redemptions and the emotional rollercoaster all the way to the end.

All right girlies buckle up. If you like this book you're gonna have to stop right now because I don't want to be responsible for your tears that my words will bring to your eyes.

This will be very spoilery, so shoo if you don't wanna know shit.

Quality: 1 star 
Enjoyment: 2.5 stars (a whole star was for just the second half)

Okay I am not sure really where to start, so I will complain first, and maybe add some things I liked at the end.

Alternate titles that would have been as equally - if not more - fitting as Iron Flame:
- Iron Trash
- Flaming Trash
- Trash Flame
- "You didn't tell me!"  "You didn't ask!"  A Bad-Communication Romantasy

The romance: Violet and Xaden's romance started off okay in Fourth Wing, not my fav. Despite the fact that it was never even enemies-to-lovers...but I digress. Now it's become even more toxic and annoying. Mostly for the first half of the book her comments were insufferable. She was the only one in her way. Okay, you could argue that shadow zaddy should have told you about all these secrets....sure, if you didn't care about the security of your whole continent. Priorities I guess. 

Tagging onto that, the sex scenes were horrible. They were weird, and not sexy and I don't know, I just didn't care for them at all. And the fact that Violet gets into a super bad sparring fistfight thing that precedes one of these intense furniture-smashing sex encounters...WITH A CHRONIC PAIN DISABILITY....just no. That is plain insensitive to any character-consistencies.

Might as well tackle the disability aspect while we're over here. Now, I do not have EDS. Yarros says she has EDS, and says that is what Violet has too, I think. I do have RA which is, from what I understand of EDS, a very different kind of chronic illness and associating chronic pain. And everyone's experience with a disability is different, even within the same disability. That is my disclaimer before these harsh opinions:

-If you are going to give your character a disability, please commit and actually make it happen, not just allude to it. Otherwise it's disability-baiting (like queerbaiting?) and it can seem like you just want it in there for attention. 
-please preface the book acknowledging this disability and the range of experiences it can encompass
-I already ranted in my review of Fourth Wing. So my expansion to that is now, why did Violet barely seem to mention her pain, especially after a physically demanding encounter of any sort?
-WHY DID YOU WRITE A ROUGH SEX SCENE AFTER SHE GETS BEAT UP AND STILL HAVE HER NOT MENTION HER PAIN????? 
-My stance on pain is still very much 'don't push through it, listen to your body's limits' while Violet's is 100% Push Through the Pain. And I personally think that is a very toxic way to think. I do not like that rhetoric.
-I'm sure responses to this disability rep are very varied, but I haven't seen a lot in general so I am not actually sure.

(A fantastic book that features a character with EDS is Fight + Flight by Jules Machias. Freaking love that book.)

Side Characters: -Dain: Suddenly he's not that horrible anymore? Okay? I'm all for a redemption arc, but not a random redemption flip. When he saved her from the interrogation (don't get me started on that) I was like huh okay. Weird. And then he continued to basically hang with the main crew for the rest of the book?? I can't deal with this character-motive inconsistency.

-Rhi: She was actually the least annoying character in the entire book and that was interesting. But it also felt like she was a different character than in the first. I'm not sure. But Violent should have started trusting her a long time ago....hang on do you see what I did there. hahaha.

-Cat: Becca, why why why do you feel the need to introduce a rival love interest/past interest. And Violent is all "I shouldn't care that she's so pretty and I'm not but I DOO '' and I just have no time for Violent's whiny ass. But also it's suddenly revealed that Cat and Xaden were betrothed and it was said so briefly and randomly I had to rewind to confirm I heard that right? Seems like a weird place to fit in very important information?? And then yet again, it faded to the background but I don't remember Violet getting over this newsflash.

-that's actually all of the side characters I remember hahahaha
Speaking of Violet, I feel like her character growth drastically backpedaled from the first book. Did she get more annoying? More whiny? More insecure? Why? How did this serve the plot? Oh wait, that's because there is no discernable plot.  

The AMOUNT of times the word fuck was used was just as unhinged as the first book because like I've said countless time The. More. You. Use. It. Its. Efficacy. Is. Lost. The. More. You. Fucking. Use. It. Its. Fucking. Efficacy. Is. Fucking. Lost. (See? See how much worse that full-stop-filled sentence becomes when I put those in?) (Yarros also loves those but since I listened to the book this time I thankfully didn't get caught up in it again.) And while there is a time and a place for swearing (which is often, if you're me), it is not while comforting someone when their parent dies. That made me physically recoil: "I'm so fucking sorry." No, do not use that while she's grieving. ew. no.

The use of the word 'armoire' is too much: A reason we have copyeditors: they find things like this and tell the author, wow you are really attached to this word maybe you shouldn't use it 30 times [awaiting ebook copy so I can confirm how many times she used it]. It was 29 more times than she should have used it.

Now some more bigger real-world political aspects regarding the author herself cannot be ignored. A few of my favorite authors have gone the neutral/silent stance recently too so my own fandoms are affected, not just Yarros. And if you are a real hardcore fan it will probably break your heart in some capacity when these things happen. (most millenials can already relate to this loss if we idolized the Terfling's words growing up and now have to wish her a fiery death.)

But no Becca, you can't get annoyed at people asking your stance on the genocide happening, annoyed at their outrage, and then retract that with 'I care about all children's lives!" That's not enough these days. Oh and then turn comments off of that post to disallow discourse. No. I don't want to get too into it because I didn't see too much firsthand, but please do your research. 

And then her appropriation of the Scottish Gaelic language. It's one thing to maybe slightly ignorantly copy stuff from a language for your fantasy book. But it's another to first: copy exact words and not change them at all, and to second: follow that up with digging your heels in, saying no I prefer to pronounce it THIS way, and not apologize for using a language ignorantly, that had been systemically stamped out by the British Empire. It is now considered 'definitely endangered' language by UNESCO since only about 1% of the population speaks it. I would have saved a modicum of respect for Becca if she learned from the outrage and didn't double down on her stance. But alas. 

This book was 200 pages longer than it needed to be.

Okay things I liked? Oh hm I said I was gonna do that didn't I.
 
I liked the dragons, they're pretty cool.

This book was so fun and entertaining to read! Though compared to the first in the series, the pacing was slower in the beginning and too fast towards the end. The ideas in this book felt less flushed out and I sometimes had to reread parts to make sure I understood what happened. The spice was 👌 though Xaden and Violet had a lot of miscommunication from not setting expectations for how they communicate and it got old. I love how we got to know the side characters better in this book! The squad is awesome. There were a few crazy twists at the end that make it so hard to wait for the next book! I’m not sure where this series is going for a total of five books, but I feel like this book could have easily been split into two.

Where Fourth Wing set up the world and characters of the series, Iron Flame significantly expanded these. Like, doubled+. Wish we'd had a character list to reference, including

gryphons and fliers

because your girl was lost. I still don't know/remember who half the dragons and their riders are! I've rated Iron Flame lower than Fourth Wing because there were small plot moments I didn't like, but overall, I think (hope) that it'll be a good bridge to the rest of the series. There are so many places it can go now!

Fourth Wing was mid at best for me, so color me shocked when I absolutely could not put down this book and realized that this was good.

(It's worth noting at the beginning here that this book needs a heavy trigger warning for torture, so if that's the only part of this review you read ((as if anyone reads my reviews )), I'll be okay.)

A lot of the issues I had with Fourth Wing were nonexistent here. Violet is no longer info dumping all the time. The world has been built in book one (no matter how lazily), so the lore we get here is well crafted and executed. It sort of felt like Fourth Wing was just the book she had to write so Iron Flame made sense.

The character writing is also much improved in book two. Particularly when it comes to Violet and Xaden's relationship. (Although I will never forgive Ms. Yarros for naming him Xaden.) This genre has so many male love interests that are too perfect and exist only to teach the FMC something about herself (Manic Pixie Dream Bat Boys™), but Xaden is flawed as hell. They fight and I can't take anyone's side because they're both wrong and toxic as hell sometimes. They both have major character growth throughout the book, and we love to see it.

The more minor characters are much more enjoyable too. In Fourth Wing I could barely keep everyone straight in my head, so it was hard to appreciate the found family banter. In Iron Flame, it's all there and wonderful. Would die for Ridoc. 

And of course we love to see this kind of disability representation. And not only EDS, but some great PTSD portrayals in there too. As a neurodivergent disabled girlie, there was lots to warm my cold heart. And all the great family drama in there too. Juicy.

This book kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. While I could predict every single twist to Fourth Wing, I had no idea what was coming next in Iron Flame. I still maintain that the Empyrean series so far is nothing revolutionary. Despite what the blurb on the cover says, this is exactly like every fantasy you've ever read. But damn if this Divergent/Eragon/wizard-books-that-shall-not-be-named mash up isn't fucking fun. Very excited for the next installment.