Red Rising by Pierce Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book started off a bit rough for me, coming across as just "Irish Hunger Games", but grew on me as it progressed. I think the interesting cast of characters is what really kept me going in this book more than anything else. Mustang, Antonia, Sevro, Pax, Cassius, Tactis. They all held me on while this story progressed. I was also really impressed with Darrow as a character. It isn't often that you see a story written where the main character is so unequivocally dominating in persona. It was refreshing to see that, and I can glimpse the future where he will perhaps cross that threshold into monster.
Pierce Brown also did a wonderful job taking these characters and turning my love of them into disgust. For the first third of the book, I thought to myself "Man, I love some of these Golds", and I could see parallels in plenty of modern fantasy and genre fiction for the character archetypes (ahem, regency period), but the way he turned that love back into disgust in the second half with the rebuilding of Darrow's army and followers was masterfully done. It all focused on the leadership style and the reason why people hold their values.
Despite all of these wonderful characters, my biggest struggles with the book in general were around the overarching story here. The whole idea that all of these kids (and they are kids), are going to a "school", which has no real training and teaching, to just murder each other seems completely impractical. The book even covers some of the weirdness of this when it showcases how several of the "best and brightest" of the students are killed off in various ways. Even at the end of the book, I was never really convinced that this whole year of just war actually amounted to anything believable in the broader society setup. The structure of the "games" don't even really give me a good idea of how the other students would secure apprenticeships. Such a large percentage of the participants end up enslaved, sometimes by happenstance, that I can't grasp how this would further the meritocracy (even when it is working) in any way.
I felt that the conquering of the other houses often times felt rushed narratively too. Each house is clearly described as having a castle, but somehow Darrow and is group are able to breach the walls of each location within a matter of minutes, with seemingly little to know capability. It seemed like the author wrote themselves into a corner a little bit and needed to resolve those narrative points just to get to the core character resolutions.
I suppose this is all just dressing to act as a setup for the future civil war though and that is fine I suppose, but I really lost a lot of my "suspension of disbelief" when it came to the whole premise of the "game" that was being played, especially when "kids" had the skills and wherewithal to literally murder the adults around them.
The ending of the book to also felt weirdly incomplete. The game was completed, Darrow gets his apprenticeship, but everyone and everything else is just left, unexplained or resolved. What? Maybe that gets resolved in a future book I guess.
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My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book started off a bit rough for me, coming across as just "Irish Hunger Games", but grew on me as it progressed. I think the interesting cast of characters is what really kept me going in this book more than anything else. Mustang, Antonia, Sevro, Pax, Cassius, Tactis. They all held me on while this story progressed. I was also really impressed with Darrow as a character. It isn't often that you see a story written where the main character is so unequivocally dominating in persona. It was refreshing to see that, and I can glimpse the future where he will perhaps cross that threshold into monster.
Pierce Brown also did a wonderful job taking these characters and turning my love of them into disgust. For the first third of the book, I thought to myself "Man, I love some of these Golds", and I could see parallels in plenty of modern fantasy and genre fiction for the character archetypes (ahem, regency period), but the way he turned that love back into disgust in the second half with the rebuilding of Darrow's army and followers was masterfully done. It all focused on the leadership style and the reason why people hold their values.
Despite all of these wonderful characters, my biggest struggles with the book in general were around the overarching story here. The whole idea that all of these kids (and they are kids), are going to a "school", which has no real training and teaching, to just murder each other seems completely impractical. The book even covers some of the weirdness of this when it showcases how several of the "best and brightest" of the students are killed off in various ways. Even at the end of the book, I was never really convinced that this whole year of just war actually amounted to anything believable in the broader society setup. The structure of the "games" don't even really give me a good idea of how the other students would secure apprenticeships. Such a large percentage of the participants end up enslaved, sometimes by happenstance, that I can't grasp how this would further the meritocracy (even when it is working) in any way.
I felt that the conquering of the other houses often times felt rushed narratively too. Each house is clearly described as having a castle, but somehow Darrow and is group are able to breach the walls of each location within a matter of minutes, with seemingly little to know capability. It seemed like the author wrote themselves into a corner a little bit and needed to resolve those narrative points just to get to the core character resolutions.
I suppose this is all just dressing to act as a setup for the future civil war though and that is fine I suppose, but I really lost a lot of my "suspension of disbelief" when it came to the whole premise of the "game" that was being played, especially when "kids" had the skills and wherewithal to literally murder the adults around them.
The ending of the book to also felt weirdly incomplete. The game was completed, Darrow gets his apprenticeship, but everyone and everything else is just left, unexplained or resolved. What? Maybe that gets resolved in a future book I guess.
View all my reviews