"Anyone have an opinion on 4th Wing?" Topic

Im intrigued that Amazon is working on the tv series but since its a Romantasy genere book I'm not sure its for me. I was wondering if anyone here read it and what your thoughts were.
link

I have it checked out and on my to-read shelf, but haven't cracked it open. As a former teen librarian I want to see what the fuss is about. I have low hopes. Most "high" fantasy teen lit is a retread of Mean Girls with swords. But 90% of everything is crud, so maybe this is a rare gem? I'll give it a shot and report back.

Okay, read part of the first chapter.
The F-bomb in the third paragraph (sixth sentence) told me to scratch the "high" part of this fantasy.
The all-woman family squabble told me a lot more. Dead Dad (wow— really going against the trope), dead brother (a two-fer!), heartless Mom… let's set up the soap opera.
And then we get the line "have to admit the clothes are pretty badass."

Well. I'm out.

First rule of world building: Don't use modern parlance in a story not set in a modern time or place. Respect your setting. This isn't that.

Life is too short for me to have to read your attempt at making female characters look "tough" by having them spout profanities and make male-like observations.

*sigh*

And then there's the open endorsement of promiscuity.

I'm done.

I've read this all before. (And it was better. It was called The Dragonriders of Pern.) And I wouldn't hand that to a teenager, either.

To me, this is trash. But I have pretty high standards for my fantasy.

I'll go read The Lord of the Rings and scrub this derivative excrement from my brain. Or, if I want a modernist fantasy feel, the much superior The Raven Cycle (by Maggie Stiefvater), where the language fits and the story has no formula. Or, for a fresh yet classic fantasy, the Eugenides stories (The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, etc.) by Megan Whalen Turner.
Anything but this overblown schlock.

YMMV. But I'm done with modern pretentious "romantasy."

Life is too short for me to have to read…

Exactly my response when Thomas Covenanter the Unbeliever raped the little girl in Book One of his series.

Luckily I had only bought one book.

There's a sci-fi writer who said he used books he didn't like as kindling in his wood burning stove. For some strange reason he was denounced. 🤷
Google was no help in identifying him.

Nope. Can tell this something I would not be interested in.

"Mean Girls with swords"

LOL! Thanks for the input. Maybe I'll get it for my wife@

As I said, YMMV.
Me, I don't go to a fantasy novel to get profanity, gratuitous sex and absurd political anachronisms. I can find that anywhere on the Internet. Or in a vegan restaurant (well, maybe not the sex). I go to experience a richly conceived world, an epic adventure, and an original and imaginative story, as well as skillful writing. To me, writers who are crude in their language are crude in their craft. And thus, I stop reading and go to something else. Does that mean I walk away from some "popular" stuff? Yeah, it does. Do I care? Not in the least.

Or in a vegan restaurant (well, maybe not the sex).

You must be going to the wrong kind of vegan restaurant.

When I read fantasy it's often older works*. I sometimes wonder if they seemed desperately contemporary when new.

* Currently reading Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea, published the year I was born.

There was a shift in American "speculative fictions" literature in the ‘30s to apparently try to include modern language and attitudes in the writing. Possibly a backlash to the purpler prose of fantasy pulps. (REH, Lovecraft, etc..)
It really didn't work, unless the hero was himself anachronistic. Otherwise, IMHO, it aged quickly. That's the problem with a "modern" vernacular— at some point it ceases to be modern.
It's okay when the setting itself is contemporary. Thus, Sherlock Holmes never gets old, nor do hard-boiled crime noir detective stories— what was contemporary is now period, and the writing fits what the reader expects, whether long ago or present day. But if you advance that language into the future, or try to press it further into the past or into an alternative world, it just comes across like a cracked bell to the reader's ear, and weakens the tale.
It really doesn't matter if the words themselves are archaic in origin (the f-bomb is a very old word), it matters what the reader expects. Maybe our medieval ancestors kicked it around like a football, they did not overly much write it down. And so our modern expectation of language from such distant periods may well be much higher than the people of those times actually spoke (especially when in their cups ). But that's what our inner ear expects, and the writer who goes against it might be closer to the true speech of the barroom brawl even a half a century ago, but literarily they are sacrificing a buy-in of setting in favor of… well, I'm never quite sure what. Sounding like a formulaic Hollywood action flick? I have never really understood the point. By now, it's all cliché anyway— a very poor way to go about writing a novel, if you ask me.

The F-word is very old, but its use as a general-purpose expletive isn't – it starts circa WW1.

John, I think the author you refer to is Spider Robinson. In his defense, he spent some years as a book reviewer for Galaxy magazine.

Ah, that sounds logical. His Wikipedia article says:
"In 1971, just out of college, Robinson took a night job guarding sewers in New York City, and wanting a career change, began writing science fiction.
Logical. 😄

So he knew crap when he saw it.