Red Rising

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.