If I was Rebecca, I'd be embarrassed by this book. It was just straight up not good and honestly I've never been so mad reading a book before. Did anyone even read this book before publishing it or was it just shoved into ChatGPT as "write me a sequel" and they printed whatever came out?

I saw someone call Iron Flame the "fast fashion of publishing" and that sums up my feelings perfectly. First of all, there are a MILLION publishing errors in this book to the point people are making literal BINGO cards of all the mistakes, from misprinted spines to missing pages, the book is a shit show.

The writing in this book is objectively bad, on many levels. Fourth Wing was not a literary masterpiece, but it was fun and it made a decent amount of sense and we all fell in love with the cast of characters Yarros spun. Iron Flame is the antithesis of Fourth Wing. Violet and Xaden were ANNOYING, WHINY, and UNCOMMUNICATIVE. Gone are the sexy, smart three-dimensional main characters we all fell in love with. Instead, I read 623 pages of flat, two-dimensional characters with no soul, no fire, just gaslighting and cringey romance (you CANNOT say endgame in a fantasy book, COME ON). Apparently Violet just lets anyone back into her life, seeing as Xaden didn't even lift a finger to win her back, and even Dane was trusted way too easily. The story line is confusing and jumps all over the *gods*damn place, Yarros tried to pack WAY too much into one book, and the plot and characters suffer massively for it. It's slotted to be a 5 book series, what on earth is the rush???

I could lament over this utter failure forever so here are brief additional qualms:
1)Jack Barlow randomly coming back, saving Violet in the middle and then fucking off until the end??
2)Andarna getting just completely snuffed for this book. There's something special about her but we are going to BARELY explain it and only in the last three pages of the book after she sleeps the literal whole time"
3)Xaden being Venin but the explanation for how or why is completely incomprehensible to me even after trying to watch bookish content creators try to explain.
4) Figuring out Xaden's second signet and then it not really even being relevant at all? We just are moving on? She just kept info dumping information that ~happened~ to be relevant in the next chapter, what a terrible writing device.
5) How did we go from "if you die we all die" to "I'm going to sacrifice myself to save us?" It's giving "nooo Ronnn nooooo, he's going to sacrifice himselffffff". WTF? Did we just forget about that???

This is what happens when these BookTok authors try to rush through the writing process, we get these half-assed disappointing books. I am genuinely so confused how this book has 4.5 stars, we clearly did not read the same thing. This book could have been really great, but instead it was just sloppy and I wanted it to be over.