Blaze: several explicit scenes2 sex scenes, 1 kissing only ยท Common Sense Media 16+
Heat our rating
4/5 Blaze
Age our rating
17+ Common Sense Media: 16+
Sex scenes
2 chapters plus 1 kissing chapter
Pages
514 Entangled edition, ISBN 9781649374080
Published
2 May 2023 Entangled Publishing / Red Tower Books
Scene chapters
Yes, but you wait for it. The Mary Sue lists three chapters: 22, 30 and 32. Chapter 22 is a kiss. Chapters 30 and 32 are the only sex scenes in the book, two chapters apart, and everything before chapter 22 is rivalry and near misses.
war, battle and hand-to-hand combat, intense violence, blood and brutal injuries, death, poisoning, perilous situations, graphic language, explicit sexual content.
Why Blaze
Several explicit scenes.
Two chapters, 30 and 32, are explicit sex scenes, and they come late, eight chapters after the first kiss in chapter 22.
Why 17+
17+ from us; Common Sense Media says 16+.
The publisher tags it new adult and prints no age.
Chapter by chapter
Chapter numbers and what happens come from The Mary Sue's chapter list. No editorial source we can use gives page numbers for this book, and the two official page counts we found disagree (514 and 528), so we leave pages out rather than guess.
Chapter
What it is
What happens
Source
Ch. 22
Kissing, no sex
The first kiss on the list, and the first time the two of them stop acting like they want each other dead. Nothing beyond the kiss.
If you are skipping, chapters 30 and 32 are the two to watch. Chapter 22 is safe for anyone who is fine with a long kiss.
Twenty-one chapters of rivalry first
Entangled tags the book with two tropes, enemies to lovers and overcoming odds, and the spice follows that order. Violet Sorrengail is twenty, was headed for the scribes, and gets pushed into the riders' quadrant at Basgiath War College by her mother, General Sorrengail. Plenty of cadets would kill her for being her mother's daughter, and the enemies-to-lovers tag tells you where Xaden starts. For the first 21 chapters the romance lives in arguments, sparring and attraction neither of them acts on.
That is why Fourth Wing reads cooler than its heat number suggests. Our 4 comes from the detail in chapters 30 and 32, and there are only two of them. A reader who stops at chapter 29 has had the rivalry, the tension and the chapter 22 kiss, and nothing explicit.
Why 17+ here and 18+ for the sequels
We put the first book a year below the next two. The scenes are as explicit, but there are fewer of them and they come late: two full scenes here, three in Iron Flame. Onyx Storm also has two, but its publisher content note adds gore, murder, animal death and grief, which this book's note does not list.
Common Sense Media is a year lower than us on all three books. Its listing for Fourth Wing shows a publisher's recommended age of 16 to 18; Entangled's own page prints no age and files the book as new adult. For a 16 year old the two scenes are easy to skip by chapter number. The violence on the publisher's list is not, because it is the plot.
The publisher's content note, grouped
This is the note in Entangled's record for Fourth Wing, sorted by kind. It is shorter than the Onyx Storm note.
Show the full note (11 items)
Fighting
war, battle, hand-to-hand combat, perilous situations
The riders' year opens with a crossing of a deadly parapet, as The Mary Sue's setup describes, so the violence starts long before any romance does. A reader who is fine with chapters 30 and 32 may still find this the harder part.
Which copy you have
Edition
Date
ISBN
Pages
Source
US first edition, Entangled: Red Tower Books (publisher record)
Two official listings, 14 pages apart, is the reason we give chapters instead of pages for this book. The graphic novel is announced, not out; we will rate it separately once it is published.
Iron Flame came out six months after this book and turns the heat up straight away: its first scene chapter is 12, and three of its six are full sex scenes. If the gap between chapters 22 and 30 was the part you liked, Onyx Storm is closer in feel, because the couple spends most of it holding back.
