Red Rising
Ratings1,353
Average rating4.1
Definitely didn't want to put it down! Only took off a star because it was a little grittier than I like (the majority of the book is a war-like situation) but in general I love the development of the main character
(5/10) I really expected more from this, after hearing it hyped up so much over the past few years. A decent premise but I didn't find the execution particularly interesting.
Way too many things feel very familiar and evocative of other books, and the book was much more YA than I went in expecting
Hunger Games in Space with even more bloodshed
Coming from a long stretch of reading just fantasy, I had trouble at the beginning of getting in the story. Once in the flow, I was shocked at the described violence and abyss of humanity. A society divided not by blood or skin colour but by birth caste. Throw in some well established slavery, injustice by the ruling parties and terrible death, you have yourself the beginning of a revolution at hand. But to understand the enemy and to get close, you have to become the enemy? The “school” to become the highest Golds does teach survival and victory by all brutal means necessary. It reminds of an even more bloody version of the Hunger Games, complete with allies and “allies”, weapons, butchering, betrayal, determination and cheating. Our MMC feels holier-than-thou and everything roots back in an event I in the end call hypocrisies. Overall however, I did get sucked in his portrayal and depiction of human error and psychological missteps (way too tame an expression) and am intrigued in seeing this self-deceiving mess further in his story. Obviously I root for the caste society to crumble and I will gladly read how it burns.
This book soared to Sovereign heights! Its storyline was as gripping as a Reaper's blade, forging a path through uncharted territories of originality. Set in a distant future on the terraformed plains of Mars, the narrative unveils a bustling solar system teeming with life. From the outset, the narrative snatched my attention and hurled me through a whirlwind of peaks and pitfalls, weaving an unbreakable bond with its characters. The diverse spectrum of characters, from the noble to the nefarious, stood as a testament to the novel's strength.
The intricate tapestry of factions, the intricacies of the caste system, and the scholarly backdrop painted a canvas of mesmerizing depth. My copy, a flawless testament to the scribes, contained not a single blemish that dared distract from the saga. I reveled in the unexpected twists and turns, vowing to procure the complete set, to relish, revisit, and enrich my personal library. This read, I proffer as a recommendation without reservation. (Written in my version of high Gold, It's Prime!)
The typical dystopian future with enough of a New Twist without it being old hat! I always love when a book immediately makes you want to read the next book, which is what happened.
It was ok.
I guess this book just isn't for me (even though I would consider myself a sci-fi fan), because I did not understand the hype around it. To me it was just another generic dystopian story with forgetful characters and boring plot.
It wasn't hard to get through the book, it is an easy read. But I also didn't get invested at all with the story.
If your thinking about reading it, do it. Maybe it clicks with you, but it didn't for me.
Quick question:
Why is this book set on mars? At no point was the fact of it being another planet used to drive the story. It could just have been the same if they were dropped in an Island on earth.
If this is the worst book in the series, I can't wait to read the rest!
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.
This is just a wild ride from beginning to end, absolutely enjoyed myself listening to the audiobook.
Exact rating: 8.15/10
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.
interesting, ill read the sequel, but WAY TOO MUCH FUCKING RAPE!!!!!! holy shit it sets red flags about the author
dear authors: please dont make your bad guys rapists and assaulters to make them more bad. i can gather that theyre bad because they killed people. signed, fucking everybody
Contains spoilers
Intense, addictive, a pure thrill ride from start to finish. Not a 5 star due to fridging EO and some very minor pacing squabbles. Easy comparisons to Hunger Games can be made, but I feel this novel is closer to Ender's Game. Brown does a great job building emotionally fraught scenes between characters and then subverting expectations. I will definitely be reading the next novel in the series. Great fun!!
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.
4.00/5.00
Sometime you experience something and it changes your perspective. Red Rising changed my idea of what a good book should be. I now understand why so many people don't seem to appreciate some of the books I've enjoyed in the past. It's because they have read better, and your expectations rise. Normal does not cut it.
Red rising is powerful, poetic and captivating. I read the entire novel in a day and some change. The book is set in the future, it uses futuristic tech, but this story is about power, the human psyche and it's about humanity. Yes it's sci-fi, but it's more. Yes it's hunger games, but it's more. Yes it's game of thrones, but it's more. Despite all these things, it was wildly romantic.
This one makes it to my top 5 all time books.
4 - Your very trope-y male dominated brutal fantasy that also tries to go above & beyond... it is well done but something's missing
The world Pierce Brown crafts is robust, full of details, and political intrigue. It is a cross between Dune and A Song of Ice and Fire in many ways. Highly recommend.
As a standalone book, this is probably 3 stars.
Weird, halting opening that sort of takes forever to get going. Pretty stilted, store-brand-hunger-games plot, and an abundance of annoying camelCasing.
But, as a setup for the next book, it's pretty decent.
This started a little slow for but the last half of the book was unputdownable. A little bit of mythology in a sci fi setting with a corrupt governing system begging to be taken down! Give it a try and keep going even if you aren't sure at first.