Butter Up That Hate Steak

The Juicy Enemies-to-Lovers Hate-Steak Job in FOURTH WING

This post contains light spoilers for the beginning of Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

I could go on and on about Fourth Wing. Listen, this book saved my sanity during an uber-difficult hike in Norway.* A muddy spill on the second day inspired me to jam my AirPods into my ears and seek out a Suffering Cinderella whose current misery was way worse than mine.

“Like hiking through Game of Thrones!” —direct quote from a video message sent after my first day of navigating snow, highland tundra, and all sorts of terrain shenanigans in Norge.

And boy, did I get what I needed from the main character of this dystopian fantasy uberseller. She’s fragile, she’s sickly, her sainted brother and father have died, and her cold general mother has commanded her into a military dragon-riding corps with a meager survival rate of around 25%.

So yeah, her story mission is a bit tougher than travailing the ranger-free and quarry-laced tundra that the Norwegian National Park system had the nerve to call a trail. Schadenfreude totally achieved—or skadefreude as they’d say with a much more melodic accent in Norway.

However, as fantasy- and adventure-forward as this book is, it also packs in a well-SPREAD Enemies-to-Lovers story that does Romeo & Juliet** even better than the patron saints of forbidden romance.

Check out this hate-steak….