Red Rising

I couldn't quite decide whether this book deserved 3.5 or 4 stars.

The story follows a 16-year-old boy from a struggling planet who unknowingly lives the life of a slave. He goes undercover to infiltrate the elite class known as the Golds. Alongside some other kids, he's sent place called the “Institute,” where they're forced to fight for honor, or something like that. It's a bit Hunger Games-esque.

But, honestly, it took me a while to really get into it. The beginning is slow, and there's a ton of violence - seriously, a lot. There are frequent mentions of murder, slavery, and r*pe. It was giving me Game of Thrones & GRRM vibes. I understand the true brutality of war, but the frequent recurrence of the ‘incidents' left me questioning the necessity.

On a brighter note, the main character is appalled by these actions and doesn't shy away from dishing out punishments to those causing trouble.

Another thing of note is that I sometimes struggled to picture what was happening. Maybe it's because I was listening to the audiobook, but the descriptions just didn't quite click. Though it's clear that Brown has a grand imagination.

The ending is a bit abrupt, like it's just setting the stage for more to come. And there are five more books in the series, I don't know if I can take that much darkness and brutality. Sometimes, I just need a happy ending.

Still, I liked Pierce Brown's writing style, and I'm curious to see if he's written anything else. So, while this book might not be for the faint of heart, it's worth a shot if you're a big sci-fi fan.

Ik vond Rood zeker overtuigend als een debuut en als een dystopische roman. Ook al is het doorspekt met heel herkenbare elementen reeds gebruikt en hergebruikt en eerdere dystopische verhalen, blijft Rood origineel en krachtig in zijn boodschap.
Er waren hier en daar wel passages die ik langdradig vond, vooral deze nodig om de complexe wereld en sommige veldslagen aan ons te omschrijven, toch heb ik genoten van dit complex en meerlagig boek en kijk ik absoluut uit naar waar het vervolg ons gaat brengen!

This is essentially Hungers Games fan fiction written in the style of a Hollywood script, devoid of any meaningful story, that concludes in a very unsatisfying way. The first third of the story is there to vaguely set up the world and the other two thirds is just kids trying to enslave each other. The chapters end on cliffhangers like TV shows would be cut for a commercial break. You can feel the author gunning for that movie rights deal. Also, it definitely feels like a part 1 because not much is accomplished (apart from Darrow winning at murder school) and the book ends on a cliffhanger. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Darrow wins everything by the end of the series. He is, by the looks of it, God incarnate.

If you are into kids murdering each other without any logical reason other than the fact that it's a significant trope in this genre then this will sate your hunger.

Or more like 3.5 stars, maybe even 3.75. When I first clicked “I'm finished”, I had no idea how many stars I was going to give this book. As I stared at those empty shapes I kept thinking that in general I liked it. I didn't have anything bad to say about the story or the writing. It was an interesting concept and vivid beginning. There were some issues in the middle. Places where I was like c'mon get on with it (and for the love of paperbacks, stop the waterworks over Eo). Darrow, our protagonist isn't always the most interesting, or heck even complex character. And the end, while a logical conclusion for the first part of a trilogy, it felt a bit like author knew he had to find a decent spot to make the break and so he closed his eyes and picked a page number out of a hat. There were world building problems, well if you want to consider a lack of world building a problem. We're thrown into this Martian world where humans have not only conquered but also figured out how to live on all the other planets in the solar system. Don't know a thing about how or why or even when. There are vague references to something happening on Earth, but they seem to contradict themselves - maybe an environmental disaster or was it a big war with coups and overthrown governments? A combination of the two with nukes involved? I honestly have no clue. Why do they use a color caste system? (seriously YA authors enough already with the color codes). Why do all these morons have the names of ancient greek and roman politicians and intellectuals and yet not think highly of the originals? Lots of questions, but no answers and that was a bit frustrating. (I'm hoping some of this is cleared up in the other books.) On the other hand, the action scenes were riveting. Watching Darrow figure out things out and use his advantages to spur others was fun. And most definitely can't forget Sevro. He was crazy scary fantastic fun.

I can definitely see the Hunger Games comparisons, but if that's all you're going to compare it with, you should really pick up a few other YA novels to add to your bedside to-be-read pile. The Divergent series. Harry Potter (where else would grav boots and ghost cloaks come from?). Lord of the Flies. Even a tiny bit of The Chocolate War. As I commented at one point this book is like a big ole melting pot of YA novels. Honestly, that's not a bad thing.

So it looks like I'll have to add Golden Son to my TBR list. And Morning Star (because I can't very well read only 2 out of 3 in the series).

wow i really didn't like this. didn't like the writing style, the world, characters, tropes, anything. if i didn't have to finish this for a readathon, i would have dnf'd it. a lot of the horrible things in this world that happened seemed to have happened for shock value, and i was rolling my eyes a lot of the time. talk about angsty. don't get the hype at all.

I went into Red Rising mildly apprehensively, as I'd heard a criticism common to longer series like this. “It gets good after x amount of books”. Usually I'd seen people say it was after this book. I would just like to say, with a great amount of chest, that that's bollocks. This book starts strong from the first line.

“I would have lived in peace, but my enemies brought me war.” Admittedly, after this, it did slow down for a bit. But it never stopped for even a second. Every single page had some amount of forward thrust, which was glorious.

This did however, lead to one of my few issues with the book. I didn't fully grasp the society's hierarchy as well as I would have liked. This is likely because of a combination of issues. For one, I don't think it was much of a focus for this book (the focus mainly being on Reds and Golds, with almost all the notable characters being one of these 2). The reader really only needed to know about 2 ranks at the very least, and have cursory knowledge on the rest.

The second is reading through an audiobook, meaning I didn't have access to any potential charts that show it off at the front of the book.

And thirdly, I straight up could have missed it, or just not been paying enough attention.
This wasn't a barrier for my enjoyment of the book, but it was something that I hope I don't continue to feel throughout the series, as from what I did grasp it seems to be a very interesting hierarchy.

However, the inequity in the society is put across perfectly. It manages to drip that kind of depression dystopian menace that Cyberpunk tends to have, while actually being an idyllic post-scarcity utopia at the same time (at least on the surface). In any other framing of the story, Darrow would be the villain, the monster stood ever so slightly off in the shadows, waiting for the sun to go down.

And the characters reinforce this brilliantly. It would have been so easy for Pierce Brown to make the golds all monstrously evil bastards without a shred of decency, and that is here, though not to the degree that Darrow (and the reader) might assume. The majority of the characters are actually pretty alright people, if not a little more arrogant than they have any right to be. But a good chunk of them are reasonably moral. Or at least as moral as you can be in a society that calculates how many cot deaths they should have in a given year.

Some even tacitly reject the ideals of the society, not seeing the point in engaging with the rules as they're laid out, due to the inherently broken nature of them. Like Sevron, for instance, who just so happens to be my favourite, and I'll scream myself hoarse if a single hair gets harmed on his little goblin head. He's a social outcast, who doesn't want power, he wants to be around people he deems worthy of his time, and I love that. He's one of the first golds you're introduced to, and at least for me, was instantly likable.

As a matter of fact, with the exception of Augustus, almost all of the Golds you meet early in the story are really likable, and a huge chunk of the Reds you meet aren't. As a matter of fact, I'd argue the biggest bastard we meet in the entire book was a red from the midpoint of the book (iykyk).
I would also like to commend the slightly more subtle aspects of the societal gaps that Brown included, such as slang essentially being upgraded to more sophisticated language. A prime example being “Bloodydamn” being turned into “Gorydamn”. They both mean the exact same thing, but the Golds have put this veneer of sophistication on their language in order to subtly mark themselves as betters to the peons beneath.

After all this gushing, I feel the need to quickly rant about something this book has that I fucking loathe. (Minor spoilers ahead, fair warning). Without getting into specifics, Darrow is far too fucking quick to move on from Eo's death. I understand that it's still a sore spot for him by the end, but the rocket speed at which he starts having to stop himself from sleeping with, IIRC, 3 different women, is fucking madness.

He was going to die for this woman. He basically killed himself because of the grief, and while yes, he mentions her a lot, he also starts eyeing up replacements within weeks of this traumatic incident he suffered. I really hope this gets addressed more tactfully in future books, because holy fuck it took me out of the book every single time. He's decided to tear down an interplanetary empire because they killed his wife, and he's already thinking of moving on? It creates this weird dissonance in his character that I really struggled to deal with. It's the only real major criticism that I had of the book.

Now, to end on a high note, I want to gush about how good the narrator, Tim Gerard Reynolds, is. Originally, I'd planned on reading these books physically, getting them all from my library. But then, I noticed that Books 1 and 2 are on Audible's Plus catalogue, so I though to myself “fuck it, why not.”

Thank god for past me. Past me makes awesome decisions. Because Reynolds is my new favourite narrator. The way he uses his accent to subtly shift the way that Darrow is thinking in his narration is amazing. The subtly different voices for most golds, highlighting the conformity of the society, making outliers (such as best boy Sevron) all the more stark is phenomenal.

And then there's the song. For those that don't know, there's a really important song in the story, that gets sung by characters on 2 separate occasions. I was in work holding back tears as Reynolds did his rendition of it. It's absolutely haunting, and honestly, I think it's better than the version at the end of the audiobook.

All in all, I adored this book, and I'm begging anyone who sees this review who's read the book, stop saying this is the book you need to get through before it gets good. This book is insanely good, and if it's only up from here, that's amazing. But I put this off for a while because I have so many series to get to, and not all of them have fans warning me about the lack of quality in early entries. It's such a disservice to such an incredible book.

I genuinely think that when the adaptation comes out, it has the potential to be the next Game of Thrones level SFF show. I'm incredibly excited to see where the next 2 books take me, and I'm planning on starting into GS tomorrow. Red Rising scores an easy 5 stars, I loved it the entire way through, and cannot recommend it enough. It absolutely lives up to the hype the series as a whole has.

Początek jest dość przewidywalny. Nic nie wiedziałem o tej książce zanim zacząłem czytać, więc byłem zawiedziony tym "szkolnym" aspektem. Długo zajęło mi przyzwyczajenie się do pierwszo osobowego punktu widzenia, ale pod koniec już się przyzwyczaiłem. Taki typ narracji sprawia, że nie wiemy co się dzieje w głowach innych postaci bo ciągle siedzimy z głównym bohaterem. Nie wiem czy to plus czy minus, ale jest to na pewno unikalny sposób pisania. Podobno ta cześć jest najgorsza że wszystkich więc moje oczekiwania są dosyć wysokie.

Had a great time with this book. Is this genre young adult fantasy? It's been years since I read one of these. At 33 somehow I didn't feel too old for this; I still was able to connect enough with the 18 year old protagonist. Unlike Enders Game which as I recall I didn't finish the whole series because it felt increasingly childish as I got older. Planning to continue with this series. Excited to discover what else this genre has maybe I enjoy these.

“Un imperio no puede destruirse desde fuera si no se destruye primero desde dentro.”

La opresión parece ser un tema recurrente en la ficción y tengo que decir que lo disfruto sobremanera. No porque simpatice con los opresores ni mucho menos, sino porque encuentro placer en la lucha organizada, en las sediciones y las rebeliones. ¿Acaso existe otra forma de acabar con la tiranía?
⠀
Lo que hace Brown aquí no es nada nuevo. Es la clásica historia clasista en la que el héroe se abre camino para intentar derrocar a los hijos de puta de arriba. Los rojos son los esclavos y los dorados los privilegiados que dominan hipócritamente una sociedad embarrada en mentiras; su juego es el poder y el mecenazgo. El protagonista es tan brillante que cuesta trabajo creer, similar al Kvothe de Rothfuss. Sí, podrías decir que tiene algunos clichés pero mira qué bien te la pasas. Luego de digerir un poco el worldbuilding la historia va cuesta arriba. ¿Lo mejor de todo? Esto termina cuando recién va a empezar

I was almost certain I was going to enjoy this series, enough to buy Fairyloot's Iron editions, and I don't regret it!

Red Rising is set in a dystopian future where society is divided into a rigid caste system based on colors (and the stuff of my worst nightmares). I'm really surprised by Pierce Brown writing, which is easy and engaging, and by his brains and imagination. He can easily shift from emotional to gruesome moments and executes flawlessly all action scenes.

Frankly, I'm hardly ever surprised by events on books, and on Red Rising I was by many, particularly on what concerns character development.

Darrow is an easily likeable character, willing to see his flaws and accept suggestions, which is not necessarily common on “the chosen one” trope. He is a complex character, full of rage, love and pain, and we see him grow and adjusting his perception and beliefs. I can't wait to find out how his journey continues!

This could be an insane villain origin story!

This was my second attempt at read/listening to this book. I DNF the book several years ago and decided to give it another go. I wish I would have DNF a second time but I stuck it out and finished listening to the audio book. To me this book was a complete mess, it started out as somewhat science fiction but then turned into this weird conglomeration of different genres. The story went from future mars, to a game that felt more medieval than scifi then throw in references to Roman gods all in a hunger game like setting on some planet. Getting through this book was absolutely torture, I hated almost every second of listening to this book, the story was uninspiring and the characters were just boring. I can not say there was any character in this book that I have any feeling for except hate. The “Game” was absolutely boring and unrealistic even for scifi. The only thing I like about this series is I find the cover art really well done but I will never read another book in the series. Huge waste of time, I would never ever recommend this book to anyone.

Holy crap, this book was so good. The characters were interesting, the stakes were top-shelf, the storytelling was solid.

The cover of this book includes a quote by Scott Sigler which reads, “Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow.” I could not do a better job explaining this book. For all its sci-fi-ness, it is delectably medieval. I think this book could easily appeal to a very wide audience. Be aware, this book has some delightful violence that may be quite intense for some. But, I believe the author did a hell of a job handling that intensity.

I literally put the book down, muttering “holy crap,” at least one time per chapter in the final 1/3 of the book. I'm talking, through the finish, people.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Do not visit the jail until you read this book.