5 Dragon Books To Read After Onyx Storm If You Still Can’t Get Over That Ending

 Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

~ Neil Gaimen remembering G.K. Chesterton

5 Dragon Books To Read After Onyx Storm If You Still Can’t Get Over That Ending

 The fastest-selling adult novel in the last twenty years? (NYT)

The book, the third in a series, has sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, and provided yet another example of the romantasy genre’s staying power.

A few years ago, Rebecca Yarros almost quit writing. A chronic illness often left her dizzy and exhausted, making it hard to work or even stand at times. She wondered if the stress she was putting on herself was worth it.

Then, she had the idea for a sprawling epic: a romance set at a military academy for dragon riders. The first novel, “Fourth Wing,” became an instant best seller, as did its sequel, “Iron Flame.”

Now, with the release of the third novel in the series, “Onyx Storm,” this month, Yarros has hit a new sales record. The book sold more than 2.7 million copies in its first week. All together, the three novels, part of Yarros’ planned five-book Empyrean series, have sold more than 12 million editions in the United States, according to her publisher, Entangled.

“It doesn’t feel real — none of it does,” Yarros told a packed auditorium of around 1,700 fans who had come to see her in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday night.

Print sales alone well exceeded a million copies in the novel’s first week, making “Onyx Storm” the fastest-selling adult title since BookScan began tracking print sales around 20 years ago.

There have been far bigger hits in children’s literature: the seventh and final novel of “Harry Potter” sold 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale. But in the realm of adult fiction, Yarros’s early sales stand out. The last record-setting adult novel, Colleen Hoover’s 2022 novel “It Starts With Us,” sold 810,000 print copies in its first week.

Yarros currently holds the first three spots on The New York Times’s hardcover best-seller list, a rare feat for an adult fiction series. On Thursday, the series also occupied the first three spots on Amazon’s “most sold” fiction list.

The success of “Onyx Storm” also shows that romantasy, which blends spicy sex scenes and romance tropes with supernatural elements, is not a fleeting trend. Last year, the genre accounted for some 30 million print sales, a rise of 50 percent over the previous year, according to Circana.

When Yarros became a fixture on the best-seller list, with the release of “Fourth Wing,” she had already published around 20 contemporary romance novels. But sales from book to book were largely stagnant, and she struggled with a chronic illness, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disorder.

Her illness, though debilitating at times, inspired her to write “Fourth Wing,” she said. Yarros grew up loving fantasy, but had never read a fantastical novel with a protagonist who had physical limitations like she did. She decided to write about a young woman named Violet, who enrolls in an elite military academy for dragon riders, and is determined to succeed despite a chronic illness that makes her weak and physically frail. 

When “Fourth Wing” came out in 2023, it arrived at an ideal moment. BookTok was in the middle of a romantasy craze, and fans quickly coalesced around Yarros. In the months after the novel’s release, videos with hashtags for Yarros and the series were viewed more than a billion times.

Book Reviews

Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism.  A very good short book, defending “left wing modernism,” a much maligned target on the right these days.  Hatherley himself is a much underrated figure, a commie who came along at the wrong time but a very good writer and thinker about aesthetics.

Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.  For whatever reason, there are more good books about the Congo than most other parts of Africa.  This is one of them.  From 2023, but good enough to make a “best of non-fiction” list for a typical year.  Very cleanly written as well.

Charles Callan Tansill, The Purchase of the Danish West Indies.  Who would have thought that this 1966 volume, and Tansill, would be making a comeback?  The biggest lesson for me here was how much the purchase was a live issue as early as 1867.  And as the final purchase approached in 1917, the other European powers were by no means happy.

Richard Overy, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan is a short but very good and substantive look at the non-nuclear and also nuclear bombing campaigns.

Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin.  A surprisingly fresh and substantive book, which also does a good job integrating the first-person perspective of the author.  I’ve read the standard biographies of Shostokovich, Prokofiev, and the like, and still learned a lot from this one.

There is Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis.

Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump is a very good book on an underexplored topic.  In some ways tech has mattered less than you might think.

Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.  A fun and well-informed look at its subject matter.  There should be more books on one of the world’s most valuable companies, and yes here supply is elastic.

Marc Hijink, Focus: The ASML Way, Inside the Power Struggle Over the Most Complex Machine on Earth.  You have to already want to read a book about ASML, but this is in fact the relevant book about ASML.  To call it boring is to miss the point, because the company itself is somewhat boring.

Jeanette zu Furstenberg, Wie gut wir sind, zeigt sich in Krisenzeiten: Ein Weckruf.  Exactly the wake-up call Germany needs.

Rainer Zitelmann, The Origins of Poverty and Wealth: My World Tour and Insights from the Global Libertarian Movement is a kind of travel memoir from a man who has become one of our most prolific writers on behalf of liberty.

And I was reading my own short commentary on Atlas Shrugged, from a few years ago.