Katastrophe Chef

Available on Kindle Unlimited

Find it here: https://amzn.to/4tDRwQw

This has been called a copycat of Fourth Wing. In the VAGUEST of ways its similar, but I’m actually mad at people who say it’s a direct rip-off of Fourth Wing. Most of this review will be a bunch of comparisons between the two.

Brace yourself, spoilers ahead….

So in the broad sense, both Dire Bound and Fourth Wing are about war colleges where the cadets/rawbonds are bonded to a magical creature – Direwolves in Dire Bound, Dragons in Fourth Wing. There are multiple dangerous trials the newbies must go through that result in the deaths of some of the cadets/rawbonds. The main character is female, there is a main love interest, and a “bad boy” who rubs her the wrong way. Oh yes, and there are government conspiracies and the big bad evil enemy that are basically magic-sucking vampires. These are all pretty common tropes in fantasy, literally all of them. If you think hard enough, you probably can come up with several books that have similar tropes. 

If you get down to the actual details of the stories, however, they are quite different, which is what pisses me off about the BookTokers who say they are the same book. 

Violet (FW) is literally a General’s daughter, who is raised in relative luxury and privilege. While she isn’t happy about going to the dragon side of war college, she accepts it as what she needs to do, and once bonded with her dragons, she doesn’t fight it. She goes to war college because it’s expected of her by her mother and family, not because of some desperate need. And Xaden, her arch-nemesis/eventual love interest, gets involved with each other relatively quickly in comparison to DB. She also has Dane, her best friend, who does eventually betray her, but is never actually an evil person. 

Meryn (DB) is a street fighter who works all day and fights at night to earn enough money to keep her mother and sister fed. Her call to action happens when her sister is taken from her bed in the middle of the night by “Nabbers,” which are Siphon (bad guys) associates in the city. Meryn then runs off to join the army because she feels this is the only way to get to the front and try to find and save her sister. It just happens to be the same time as the Bonding trials, where the Dire Wolves pick people to be their Bonded human. Meryn never wanted to be bonded and fought tooth and nail about becoming one. It takes the majority of the book for Meryn and her dire wolf to really get along. 

Stark is Meryn’s Xaden in DB. However, she literally hates him for the most part until the last maybe 50 pages of the book, and even then, nothing happens between them. Killian is the man she loves, whom she had been seeing already at the beginning of the book; they had been seeing each other for a year by the time the book starts. He eventually betrays her, but Dane’s betrayal seems like child’s play compared to Killian’s betrayal. 

Honestly, I felt like Powerless was closer to DB than FW was when it came to plot points. I hope DB doesn’t go the way of FW and have lackluster books 2 and 3. Book two was alright, but didn’t quite capture the feelings I had for FW, and book three was a disappointment for me – it genuinely was hard for me to finish because it just felt like book 2.5.

Dire Bound for me was an enjoyable read. I can’t fault Meryn’s decisions because, as a reader, it’s easy for me to see all the red flags on the pages, but from her perspective, it would have been hard to see them. She was someone who always had to rely on herself, and trust came hard. In hindsight, they were poor decisions, but I wouldn’t change them given the information available. Meryn definitely grew as her experiences changed; she was still the same person, but she didn’t stay stagnant either. 

This is a 5 Raccoon read for me with a 3.5-star literary. I didn’t really have any “GASP PLOT TWIST!” moments, except that at the very end, there was one. I accurately predicted all the other plot twists by the midway point of the book. For the places that don’t have a Raccoon reading system yet (aka everywhere else), I’m giving it 4.5 stars mostly b/c I devoured the book and can’t wait for the next one to come out in May.