Red Rising

This series is so, so good. It is an emotional rollercoaster that is at times hard to read because the characters' pain is your pain. You grow to care so much about these well-fleshed-out characters, and the author does an amazing job at making both the reds and golds and all the colors between complex. There is no clear good and evil. The reds are not wholly good and the golds are not wholly bad. I love how he shows this yet still makes you understand that the societal structure that stands on the backs of the suffering lower castes must be destroyed. He shows the struggle in a rebellion - the balance that must be struck between tearing down and rebuilding and how easily the good side may become bad if they don't hold onto the future they're fighting for.The audiobooks for this series are a masterpiece.Darrow is a Red and a HellDiver. He lives in the deep mines of Mars, loving his wife Eo and taking pride in his work even as his people starve and his death threatens to arrive every day via a pit viper or a lost limb. Then, Eo shows him a secret section of the mine they were never supposed to see - a garden. He's never seen the sky, never felt grass beneath his feet. Eo tries to convince him to rebel, but he won't risk dying like his father did. He has Eo to live for. That's before they're caught exiting the garden. Eo is whipped and then executed when she sings a forbidden song that still lives in my head to this day.

My love, my love
remember the cries
When winter died for spring skies
They roared and roared
But we grabbed our seed
And sowed a song
Against their greed
And
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper swing, the reaper swing
the reaper swing
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper sing
A tale of winter done
My son, my son
Remember the chains
when gold ruled with iron reins
we roared and roared
and twisted and screamed
For ours, a vale
of better dreams

 Darrow is saved by the Sons of Aires. They ask him to sacrifice everything to save his people by undergoing the carving to become a Gold and infiltrate the institute.