Red Queen

The first time I read Red Queen was in 2017; I was sixteen years old and finally ready to grow from Percy Jackson and Divergent into other popular books for teens at the time. I was given a copy of this book by my grandmother, and I was initially hesitant to read it due to the massive hate bandwagon this book had garnered. Needless to say, I blindly hopped on that bandwagon as I read the first two books. Now I'm back to see if it still holds true, like I did with The Raven Boys and Caraval.

Red Queen is a story I've read and seen many times before in different forms, with tropes that are overused— sometimes severely. However, it's not an entirely bad book. It's more well written than some books that are being published today cough cough Zodiac Academy, Lightlark, Sanctuary of the Shadow, someone stop me, though I'm not the biggest fan of the frequent chunky paragraphs that lessen the dialogue.

Mare Barrow is very much your typical Mary Sue female main character with special Chosen One powers. Cal is very much your typical forbidden love interest. The Red blood vs. Silver blood plot is very much your typical caste-based book plot. But the plot twist with Maven, despite remembering it from my initial read, is what bumps this up half a star. While it's technically somewhat predictable, it's still a well thought out plot twist and ending for an author's debut novel of a 2010s young adult series.

TL;DR: I understand why many didn't enjoy this novel, but I don't think that the hate train that this book received was completely deserved.