Red Rising

Wow! I don't even know where I should start.

I guess I should begin with saying that I loved this book. I loved it so much I read it in less than a day and I just bought “Golden Son” and pre-ordered “Morning Star.” I shall now attempt to demonstrate why.

We're all bored with dystopian science fiction, aren't we? Well, not anymore.

I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but I really want you to read this book. It does a better job of setting up a revolution than “Divergent” or “The Hunger Games.”

Pierce Brown does an incredible job of weaving a story that sucked me in and made my heart race. When Darrow experiences the worst tragedy of his life, the tragedy that makes him a revolutionary, I felt it. I felt the mounting dread as he realized what was about to happen. My heart pounded when I myself realized what was coming. And when it happened, I cried.

Darrow isn't perfect, but he loves his family, and he wants revenge. He makes mistakes, he gets things wrong. He rude, impulsive, afraid, and so incredibly angry. His rage burns in your own chest as he realizes that for 500 years, his people have been lied to and enslaved.

I enjoyed this book because I was rooting for someone who was finally realistic. Katniss Everdeen was cold and clinical. Tris was whiny.

Darrow does everything because he wants revenge, and hopefully the rebirth of a broken system. His love for his wife and the life they should have had drives him. But what's amazing is watching him evolve. Like I said, he makes mistakes, but don't we all?

He feels shame and remorse when people die and constantly evaluates if his mission is worth the cost. There are difficult sacrifices made along the way, and the people who die for him, he does not forget.

I really hope you pick this up. People say this book started out slow, but I didn't feel that way. Perhaps because I read it over the course of a single day, it didn't feel like it was dragging. I didn't feel like there were too many houses, colors, or characters. Everything had a purpose. Everyone had a job to do. And I can't wait for more!

P.S. I loved that it was on Mars! Space stuff rocks!

At first this book seems to have a lot of used elements from many popular dystopian novels but this novel is violent, brutal, and graphic. The writing is strong. The world building is excellent and easy to believe. Although the main character is only 16 this is an adult novel.

Brilliant. So much so, that Red Rising takes it's rightful spot as my fourth 5-star book of this year. If only I would have known what brilliance was waiting for me, this would have been read much sooner. As my audio book neared its end, and my heart beat started to slow to a more normal rhythm, there was only one word left in my head: DAMN. That, and the need to find out what happens next.

I was instantly impressed at how easily I was immersed in this story. Darrow was a character that I could get behind, and one I understood. Loyal, loving, and full of a rage that is buried so deep down he doesn't even know how to address it anymore. Here was a character who accepted his lot in life because he felt he had to. Because he was too afraid to fight back. That is, until life gave him no choice. I tell you, his character ate at my heart. So much pain, so much agony, and yet such a brave soul.

Truthfully, it was the brutal, often gory, way this story was told that really won me over. I think too often in YA violence and gritty topics are swept under the rug. I've read many a Fantasy story where everything was solved in such a simple manner, ignoring the fact that rebellions are often drenched in blood, sweat and tears. This book didn't shy away from that. It was sad at times, dark at others, but full of lessons learned. I was so taken in by all of it. This read like a book that was aimed for at adults, and I ate that up.

Bravo. Simply, bravo. I have nothing but love for Red Rising. If this is what I can expect from Pierce Brown from now on, sign me up! I'll be waiting in line.

SUCH a good book. Blew me away. I can't wait to start on book 2!

You know I really love a book when I start pushing it on all of my reader friends. I keep telling everyone that Red Rising is a mix between The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and Age of Empires - and that's really the best description I can give. It has a little bit of romance but not the kind that get annoying or ends up being the main focus. It has a little bit of warfare but not the kind that's overly boyish and hard to understand. And it has the fight for power that shows a society's weakness and builds upon the hope of civilization. There's so much emotional turmoil and action in this book that seamlessly winds together in a fast-paced twisty-turny story. I absolutely loved everything about it.

I almost didn't read this because I thought it was going to be just another YA dystopian series (blah)... but it is definitely unlike any of the other dystopian craze books. Give it a chance. You won't regret it.

Like the Hunger Games, but better written.

It was a good enough book, but I personally need to get some space from dystopian future where children/young adults need to overthrow/reform a corrupt system. This wasn't a copy cat, at all, but it wasn't earth shattering either.

Good read, fun read ... I'd read this before Divergent, after Hunger Games, instead of Maze Runner ...

“Death isn't empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, of death. I say we break those chains. Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society.”

I don't even know where to begin with this book. It was just beyond compelling. It was such a unique setting for a dystopian. You have the main setting of Mars in the future where humans have colonized various planets. Plus you have this caste like system based on colors with Gold being the top and Reds at the bottom. Darrow, of course, is at the bottom, a Red, who drills for helium to help society. Beyond this caste system, you have the fact that Darrow and the other Reds have been lied to about the progress made colonizing the planets and moons.

Not only was the setting and premise of the book great, the writing was astounding. Even with all the jargon and world building, Pierce Brown wrote in an enthralling way that had me continuously turning the page to see what would happen to Darrow and those around him. Within the first 50 pages, Brown shocks us and ups the ante of Darrow's fight. I just really enjoyed the writing style and never wanted to put this book down (even when I had to go to work).

Once Darrow is on the surface of Mars, he meets a cast of characters who we have been groomed by Darrow's experiences to despise, but I couldn't help but love them and their personalities. Each one was different and had their own woes and struggles even if they were Golds and at the top of society.

Now that I have finished Red Rising, I want to start Golden Son right away. This trilogy has the potential to be amazing and I cannot wait to see what happens to Darrow and his companions in the final two books in this trilogy. This book was a great start to a trilogy that I assume will only get better as we move forward.

I guess being a fan of Ender Wiggin its impossible not to like this book. The similarities abound and most of the good qualities are retained. What Pierce brings to the table though is heart. So the driving force behind Darrow is more than the need to succeed and you understand all the things he does just to keep going. The rest of the cast also play a much bigger role and are well crafted too. The world creation to the Roman Gods is interesting if a little cheesy. But in the end its a cracking book set at decent pace and a nice addition to my “read” shelf:-)

On the second read also it was equally interesting read. The whole expansion to the other planets is nicely done with it just being a backdrop. Make no mistake if you want a story that will make you believe in the difference a single person can make then you have found your grail. Onwards

This book gets better with a second reading...and third.

I just read it again because I got my hands on Iron Gold, and I love that the story still holds little surprises to find that an unaware first reader will miss. What a treat.

This is the beginning of an awesome story and engrossing all on its own. If you enjoy adventure, give Red Rising a shot. Seriously fantastic. I love the world, the characters, the challenges, and Brown makes it all keep us reading.

I'm having a hard time deciding what to say about this one. To really talk about it would require me spoiling every plot point that I loved (most of which I didn't see coming). So I won't. I'll just say that I really, really dug this book.

I don't want to just compare this to [b:The Hunger Games|2767052|The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)|Suzanne Collins|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358275334s/2767052.jpg|2792775], as much as reviews/blurbs/etc. make a guy want to. There are some surface-level similarities, yeah. And you could make the case (as I did when just starting the book) that Brown's Mars was just the place for people who thought Collins' Panem was a bit easy. In fact several parts of this feel like [b:The Hunger Games|2767052|The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)|Suzanne Collins|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358275334s/2767052.jpg|2792775] dialed up to 11. The working/living conditions for Darrow and his family are more severe, what Darrow has done to him to prepare him for what's to come makes what Cinna et al. do to Katniss look like child dress-up, Darrow plays a deadly game on a larger scale than Katniss, and so on. But Darrow's motivation is different than Katniss' – she's trying to survive, he's trying to do far more (and much of the time, survival's pretty low on his list) – the stakes he's playing for are greater, and he will go to lengths that Ms. Everdeen doesn't have to.

There are a few moments when things seem too slow, or meandering, or even redundant – but each time, I was wrong, and Brown made it all pay off. Visceral was the word that kept coming back to me as I read the book. I had almost visceral reactions to some of the horrors depicted, I could feel the grime and muck (literal and metaphorical) that Darrow crawled around in.

This shows every indication of leading to something epic in the next volume, leaving Mars behind and moving to other planets and/or the space between. As well as seeing if Darrow can retain his self and purpose – and how far will he be willing to go to carry it out.

There is a classic SF reference in Part IV that made me giggle with delight (in the middle of a pretty grim part of a fairly grim book, so I appreciated the placement). I won't spoil it, but Pierce Brown has bought a lot of loyalty from me with two simple words.

Go grab this one.

Christ.It's not often that the comp titles listed on the front cover or in press releases of a book are so completely accurate. There are scenes in Red Rising that could have been lifted straight from [b:Ender's Game 375802 Ender's Game (The Ender Quintet, #1) Orson Scott Card https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388177928s/375802.jpg 2422333], there's even a direct reference to its characters. You can see the traces of [b:The Hunger Games 2767052 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) Suzanne Collins https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358275334s/2767052.jpg 2792775]'s Roman-based elite dystopian society in the characters names. Everywhere in this book you can see where pieces from other stories were picked up and scrambled together. In anyone else's hands Red Rising would have been extraordinarily derivative. But put together by Pierce Brown, it is fucking brilliant. This book chews up all those conventions and tropes and turns them into a gory masterpiece. This book is a beast with a bloody red maw.I didn't get into this book for the plot, or the hype, or even Brown's pretty face. I decided a while ago that I was pretty much done with stories about kids killing each other over abitrary titles. It wasn't even any of the soaring reviews that convinced me. It was the writing. I saw samples of what this kid can do, and I thought, well shit, if the rest of the book is like that it'll be worth it. And its true, his prose is beautiful, but its more than that. I was talking to my mother a while back about how, regardless of how enjoyable a work by a young author is, you still can often see the gaps. There's almost always a kind of incompleteness, in the world-building or the story-telling or the character development. It can often be ignored to some degree, but it keeps you from getting completely engrossed. There are no gaps here. I am stunned by Brown's level of ability, not just for a young author, but for any kind of writer. He is up there with Ian McDonald and Glen Duncan for me right now, the kind of writers that inspire the most profound envy in me. In a way, I think my love for this book is an unrequited relationship. I love it, and it doesn't love me back. It stressed me out. Every time I picked it up, it slapped me in the face and walked away laughing. It's brutal, but there's such delight in its brutality. The writing is animal, the pages breathe and bleed. Imma be real, I drifted a little when there was a lot of battle tactics and strategies being discussed. Brown also has a thing for skimming, stretches of time flicker by in a paragraph, and some of the hardest parts he lets you take a step back from. But you get dragged back in so quickly by Darrow. I giggled and danced at his every triumph, his wild humor, his ecstatic approach to violence and war. Terrible things happen during this game he plays, but still it is a game, and Darrow revels in moving his pieces around as well as smashing them to bits.The plot moves constantly, like Darrow, you're never given any chance to rest or let your guard down. There's also the human, emotional element. I will admit, I'm a little wary. I love books like N.K. Jemisin's [b:The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms 6437061 The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy, #1) N.K. Jemisin https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1303143211s/6437061.jpg 6626657] that give their oppressive villains no quarter. These people already have voices, and the tendency for stories to give wicked powerful people more room to be sympathetic is an old one. But it's still useful for a narrative like this. Darrow is not fighting robots, he has to entrench and assimilate himself to a society and then destroy it from the ground up. To do this, he has to know them, even love them. And Darrow loves powerfully, because he's wildly passionate and ultimately a good person. He loves Cassius who is the epitomy of Gold elitism, he loves the poet Roque who never really says anything poetic until the very end. He loves the Goblin Sevro, and god so do I, in all that boy's rabid quiet fury. And he loves Mustang, the girl who reminds so much of his late wife, so much that I was starting to think Brown was fucking with me (which is a fair assumption to make, at all times). In fact, Darrow's most difficult moment comes when he finds another Red like him, disguised among the Golds. He doesn't demonize the Golds, probably never did, like he says at the beginning of his story, he was a good slave. When he is near death at one point, he imagines his wife with golden hair, because he believes that in the afterlife that's how she would be rewarded. Even after everything he had been through, everything he's seen, he still sees them as superior. Brown has a way of drawing emotion in a truly naked way. The gloss of pretty words and a thickening plot get stripped back, and there's just a teenage boy who wants to go home, sleep next to his wife and dig. His loneliness got to me. Maybe it's because it's the dead of winter now, but open spaces around me suddenly seemed a lot bigger. Like I said, this book stressed me out. A part of me wants to run as far away from it as possible, read about something silly and happy next. The rest of me is craving the catharsis of the next book, because maybe it'll fix everything that the first has messed up in me. More likely it just ruin me even more.

I found this a thrilling and enthralling ride from start to end. It reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games but that wasn't a negative as I also loved The Hunger Games. I highly recommend this book, and am eagerly awaiting the next book in the series.