Finished reading: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

I went into this book thinking it was more YA fantasy. And it is! A special girl goes to school where her mom is in charge, and she learns she’s even more special than she thought! The small-town boy-next-door she grew up with turns out to be a giant jerk, and the dark, brooding, phenomenally attractive arch-enemy-with-a-heart-of-gold becomes the love of her life. And obviously they save the world together, or whatever.

But about two-thirds of the way through, there was an explicit, hardcore sex scene. And a few chapters later, there was another one—more abbreviated but no less hardcore. Not poorly written or ineffective, just shocking to me, the unprepared reader thinking this was basically Hunger Games with dragons.

Still a YA novel by genre, just aimed at not-so-YAs.

The fantasy world also gets routinely interrupted by Earth conventions like giving people the finger or naming the months “October”, “November”, etc. What are the chances this fantasy society developed the same Latin-derived month names and insulting hand gestures?

Despite it all, the story is intriguing enough and the writing light enough for me to check out the sequel. 📚