Fourth Wing but instead of a war college and dragons, Shield of Sparrows has 200 pages of road trip, the Endor tree village, 200 more pages of road trip, and magical rabies. 

I ate up the first ten chapters and devoured the last ten chapters because the plot PLOTS at the beginning and end of the book. Unfortunately the plot goes missing during the middle, because despite all of her questions and all of her scheming, Odessa does not have much impact on the story during the middle of the book.

To the credit of the book, I will say that the middle of the book has a really juicy interpersonal conflict that kept me locked in (

Odessa believing that she is married the Zavier but falling for the Guardian

). I did LOVE the drama, I cannot lie. I really liked the way that Odessa and the Guardian are written. Although the genre of Romantasy is getting oversaturated, Odessa and the Guardian felt very unique. However, all of the other characters felt very surface level and unexplored (

Zavier's death felt like it was trying very hard to mirror Liam's death from Fourth Wing but we never really got to know Zavier, so I didn't have much of an emotional reaction

).

This book was very hard to rate because at the end of the day I really enjoyed reading this book but HOLY FUCK did it have a pacing problem. I’m a little disappointed because I wanted this to be a 5 star read for me.