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baghaii's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Physical abuse, and Death
Moderate: Rape, Sexual content, Misogyny, Sexual assault, Slavery, Sexism, and Sexual violence
Minor: Homophobia
dawn_marie's review against another edition
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
Sooooooo after half a dozen attempts and lots of prodding by friends, I finally managed to finish Red Rising by Pierce Brown and I really dislike it. The novel is marketed as a “dystopian science fiction,” I find that neither is correct. Other than being set on Mars and having some fancy tech, there is nothing “science fiction” about the novel. I suppose one could consider the novel dystopian if they really stretched the definition.
The idea of the novel is interesting: in a future where humans expanded their reach into the solar system, Mars – being rich in a mineral/gas necessary for terraforming – has becoming a mining colony. Society is structed in a color-coded caste system where Reds are the lowest, performing the most dangerous jobs (specifically the mining), and Golds are the pampered ruling class. After a tragic event and witnessing the indifference of the Golds, a Red is recruited to become a spy amongst the Gold ranks to challenge the status quo, and usher in change. While that sounded intriguing, that’s not what we go. Instead, Red Rising is a Hunger Games/Battle Royale clone, with a Gary Stu protagonist, repetitive info dumps, and painfully bad writing.
The story is narrated by Darrow, a thoroughly unlikeable character who manages to easily overcome every hardship/hurdle he faces. Of course Darrow is the youngest and bestestdrill operator helldiver that ever was, of course he is best loved amongst the Reds, of course he married the most beautiful girl in the colony, of course he not only proceeds to mine a “dangerous” pocket when everyone tells him not to, but manages to mine the biggest ore find in history, and of course he’s the first one in the family who mined enough ore to win the laurel. After his wife dies, Darrow is recruited by the Sons of Ares to infiltrate the Golds, where – after his makeover montage – he of course manages to miss only one question out 100s on the entrance exam, of course he charms everyone around him, of course he figures out some of the puzzles, traps, and tricks in the arena before anyone else, of course, although he only had a few weeks training, he manages to defeat people who have been training with weapons their entire life, and of course he manages to win everything. Nothing was ever hard for Darrow; everything came easily to him and what little conflict/difficulty did arise was quickly resolved and fell Darrow’s favor.
The rest of the cast were caricatures, serving little purpose other than to demonstrate how “awesome” Darrow is; that he’s “not like other guys”. The few characters that did get significant page time were deplorable, not one of them were likeable, or at a minimum, rootable – I wanted them all to fail, and fail miserably. The author’s portrayal of females was especially problematic, with the two main named female characters (Eo and Mustang) being quickly fridged*, and the others being reduced to prizes, arm candy, victim, or something to toy with.
For a novel that is filled with battle and fight sequences, it moves at a glacially slow pace. I blame that on the author’s choice to use first person narrative, where Darrow constantl makes tangential “philosophical” musing or dumps a ton of information. There was entirely too much tell and not enough show and writing that tried to be clever but came off pretentious (this happened every time Darrow mused about the political structure or people’s motivations). While this can work, it didn’t here mainly due to the author’s writing style, which vacillated between clumsy and clunky, with some cringe-worthy thrown in for good measure.
I don’t know who the intended audience is, but the book is feels extremely YA and should come with a trigger/content warning (regardless of the audience) as it is filled with causal violence, brutality, murder, maiming, torture, physical and sexual assault, rape, cannibalism, homophobia and misogyny slavery, and human trafficking.
I am told that that series gets better, and Pierce Brown’s writing improves with each installment. I did read the first few chapters of Golden Son and did not see any improvement in writing or storytelling. Unless the author magically/spiritually manages to channel Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, I don’t see myself reading future works.
*Fridiging – a plot device in which female characters face disproportionate harm (death, maiming, assault, rape, kidnaping) to motivate male characters.
The idea of the novel is interesting: in a future where humans expanded their reach into the solar system, Mars – being rich in a mineral/gas necessary for terraforming – has becoming a mining colony. Society is structed in a color-coded caste system where Reds are the lowest, performing the most dangerous jobs (specifically the mining), and Golds are the pampered ruling class. After a tragic event and witnessing the indifference of the Golds, a Red is recruited to become a spy amongst the Gold ranks to challenge the status quo, and usher in change. While that sounded intriguing, that’s not what we go. Instead, Red Rising is a Hunger Games/Battle Royale clone, with a Gary Stu protagonist, repetitive info dumps, and painfully bad writing.
The story is narrated by Darrow, a thoroughly unlikeable character who manages to easily overcome every hardship/hurdle he faces. Of course Darrow is the youngest and bestest
The rest of the cast were caricatures, serving little purpose other than to demonstrate how “awesome” Darrow is; that he’s “not like other guys”. The few characters that did get significant page time were deplorable, not one of them were likeable, or at a minimum, rootable – I wanted them all to fail, and fail miserably. The author’s portrayal of females was especially problematic, with the two main named female characters (Eo and Mustang) being quickly fridged*, and the others being reduced to prizes, arm candy, victim, or something to toy with.
For a novel that is filled with battle and fight sequences, it moves at a glacially slow pace. I blame that on the author’s choice to use first person narrative, where Darrow constantl makes tangential “philosophical” musing or dumps a ton of information. There was entirely too much tell and not enough show and writing that tried to be clever but came off pretentious (this happened every time Darrow mused about the political structure or people’s motivations). While this can work, it didn’t here mainly due to the author’s writing style, which vacillated between clumsy and clunky, with some cringe-worthy thrown in for good measure.
I don’t know who the intended audience is, but the book is feels extremely YA and should come with a trigger/content warning (regardless of the audience) as it is filled with causal violence, brutality, murder, maiming, torture, physical and sexual assault, rape, cannibalism, homophobia and misogyny slavery, and human trafficking.
I am told that that series gets better, and Pierce Brown’s writing improves with each installment. I did read the first few chapters of Golden Son and did not see any improvement in writing or storytelling. Unless the author magically/spiritually manages to channel Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, I don’t see myself reading future works.
*Fridiging – a plot device in which female characters face disproportionate harm (death, maiming, assault, rape, kidnaping) to motivate male characters.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture and Violence
Moderate: Homophobia, Trafficking, Sexual violence, and Slavery
Minor: Cannibalism
pnwbibliophile's review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
This book had me on a roller coaster of emotions. First, I was texting my friend that I couldn’t get into it because the beginning was honestly slow and info-dumpy. After Darrow was resurrected, however, I was hooked. I hear this might be the weakest book in the series, so I’m cautiously excited to dig into the rest.
While I genuinely loved this, there were a few glaring drawbacks that diminished it from being a 5 star read. The opening didn’t draw me in. The writing was also laced with a lot of veiled misogyny and homophobia like men calling each other “little girls,” pixies,” or “pricklicker.” The only presumed gay character was written as making the main character uncomfortable by flirting like the gay guy was a villain. Literally that was all you get at first is he is gay and bad. This is extremely common in straight male-written sci-fi/fantasy, but both genres honestly need to grow up and evolve past this. The portrayals of all the women in this were also not my favorite. The majority of them were either a conniving opponent, a helpless victim, or a love interest there for Darrow to claim.
In a series whose central theme is fighting oppression, an author who doesn’t get the full scope of that message can make that message fall flat and make you ponder if they are the right vessel to champion that message. Going to give the author the benefit of the doubt and read on. However, if the more recently published books still have the same problems, I’m going to move on even if the plot is riveting.
***
Adding in after more rumination:
The emotions of this felt very much like “Darrow felt ___” The emotions were told to me instead of making me actually feel them. Darrow’s entire character arc also felt too facile and convenient. Sad, poor, miner? Boom! You’re resurrected as an elite Gold! You get in a pickle fighting? Boom! Someone else saves you! While these did make for some excitement, the plot was a bit shallow when you dig into it. I also knocked my star ranking down because I think I put too much empasis on how the book sucked me and not on the problematic aspects.
While I genuinely loved this, there were a few glaring drawbacks that diminished it from being a 5 star read. The opening didn’t draw me in. The writing was also laced with a lot of veiled misogyny and homophobia like men calling each other “little girls,” pixies,” or “pricklicker.” The only presumed gay character was written as making the main character uncomfortable by flirting like the gay guy was a villain. Literally that was all you get at first is he is gay and bad. This is extremely common in straight male-written sci-fi/fantasy, but both genres honestly need to grow up and evolve past this. The portrayals of all the women in this were also not my favorite. The majority of them were either a conniving opponent, a helpless victim, or a love interest there for Darrow to claim.
In a series whose central theme is fighting oppression, an author who doesn’t get the full scope of that message can make that message fall flat and make you ponder if they are the right vessel to champion that message. Going to give the author the benefit of the doubt and read on. However, if the more recently published books still have the same problems, I’m going to move on even if the plot is riveting.
***
Adding in after more rumination:
The emotions of this felt very much like “Darrow felt ___” The emotions were told to me instead of making me actually feel them. Darrow’s entire character arc also felt too facile and convenient. Sad, poor, miner? Boom! You’re resurrected as an elite Gold! You get in a pickle fighting? Boom! Someone else saves you! While these did make for some excitement, the plot was a bit shallow when you dig into it. I also knocked my star ranking down because I think I put too much empasis on how the book sucked me and not on the problematic aspects.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Rape and War
Minor: Sexism and Homophobia
lonelylooper's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Physical abuse, Rape, Misogyny, Death of parent, Classism, Cursing, Death, Gore, Sexual assault, Slavery, Torture, Blood, Kidnapping, Murder, Suicide attempt, Violence, and War
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, and Body shaming
Minor: Homophobia, Excrement, and Cannibalism
_fallinglight_'s review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.5
This book is proof that no matter what book I previously thought was the worst I'd ever read, there's always a 10th level of worseness hell out there that I can subject my poor brain to. What an absolute dreck of a book. I despised everything in it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Misogyny, Rape, Excrement, Injury/Injury detail, Slavery, Suicide, Violence, Murder, Death, Gore, Physical abuse, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Suicide attempt, Blood, Sexism, and War
Moderate: Cursing
Minor: Vomit and Homophobia
rachel_sherck's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
I started typing this review with my thumbs, beginning to list my many, many thoughts from simplest to most complex. As it went on and I delved into the “most complex,” my thumbs really flew, my blood pressure rose, and I circled back to the beginning of this text box, scrolled up, and lowered my rating from 4.0 to 3.0. 🤷♀️
Did I like this book? In so many ways, yes. The premise, the style of prose, the fabulous narration (I read this one in audio), and the setting all drew me in from the first pages. Which was kind of the problem. More on that later. 😝
When I began reading, I had that fabulous sensation that I was embarking on an epic adventure I would never forget. The beginning of the book steeped me in the world, planted dozens of seeds of curiosity, and also made me fall slightly in love with the audiobook narrator. And then disappointment started setting in.
Pacing
The pacing in this book felt very strange to me. At the outset my impression was that this would be an immersive story told in a close point of view, but by the end of the book, despite the first person/present tense, there was nonetheless distance between myself and the action. With a few exceptions, mostly battle sequences, more than half of this book I experienced at a distance, observing a war games plot that interested me only marginally, deeply missing the feeling evoked by the early chapters.
I know what I’m describing is a pacing and style preference. I’ve not read many reviews of this book (yet) but I noticed a few preferred the pacing of the later part of the book above the “slow” beginning. But the inconsistency in pace is what throws me, as it set my expectations for a nuanced, emotional, character-driven book but ultimately delivered a broad-strokes sequence of events surrounding Darrow and his fellow students’ strategy games.
Stakes and tension
We all knew that the games were just games and wouldn’t matter after a winner was declared, so it was frustrating to spend the bulk of the book on events that didn’t prompt any noticeable evolution of the main character, Darrow, or deepen our understanding of Gold culture, the history of humanity in this world, or anything significant on a world building level. Save a few casual details about the way that the carvers had built hyped up versions of earth animals and stocked Mars with them, but this amounted to only a few lines. Still it was one of the few things I enjoyed about the majority of this book past the first act.
I clung to hope that if I could get through the long game of the “school,” the book would return to the themes that it introduced long enough to hook me in the beginning. But honestly, by the end I had lost hope of that and only kept reading because I knew this was the first book in a long, acclaimed series, and I’m willing to read at least one more to give the series a solid opportunity to redeem itself.
Misogyny
I left this critique for last, but in a way it was the aspect of the book that most negatively affected my experience. I heard another reviewer describe the misogyny in this narrative (which is objectively present, and readers who disagree need to really ruminate on their own concepts of gender and sexism) as feeling like a belief system from our world that leached into the world of the story. That is so well expressed and resonated with me immediately. Let me get into it…
I don’t mind misogyny existing in fiction. In fact, sometimes its total absence can test my suspension of disbelief to a point where I’m just as frustrated as if it had been present without basis, the way it is in this book. But when misogyny is present in a book written in this century, I expect it to be depicted thoughtfully and accurately, and consciously and deliberately challenged on the page. And if it’s present in a book written in this century and set several hundred years in the future, in a society that is sufficiently functional to have colonized and terraformed the entire solar system, then I expect it to make sense.
Misogyny cont’d (sexism)
In Red Rising, there are clear gender roles in the society of the Reds where Darrow grew up. Only men go into the mines. Women are revered by Darrow as being a source of beauty, gentleness, etc., that in some ways defies the dirty and brutal existence of his people. And he’s 16 when the book begins, so a kind of chivalrous version of misogyny works for his point of view. But he never evolves beyond this, expressing no surprise when he meets the rebels and one of them is a woman (who, like everyone else in this book, particularly the women, is described in a fashion that centers her attractiveness. She is beautiful on the unscarred half of her face. Even more beautiful, apparently, than the wife Darrow is still purportedly mourning). Readers are seemingly expected to interpret the world outside of the mines as more egalitarian among the sexes. Men can be “pinks,” the caste of people enslaved for the purpose of sexual gratification, and women can go to the war college that Darrow ultimately attends.
Yet many characters, not just Darrow, consistently center the concepts of leadership and honor around men. I could reread this book with a highlighter and capture every instance of this, or you could skim the book yourself and easily find examples. So which is it? Is the world gender egalitarian or strictly patriarchal? Or is it in some tense state of transition, like the world we live in? There isn’t enough nuance here to know. Which tells me that the author and editors weren’t giving it much thought. Which is disappointing and depressingly unsurprising.
Anyway, by the time the story events became overtly sexist misogynistic, I had more or less accepted that this book was going to miss an opportunity to say something interesting about gender, but I still became increasingly tempted to quit reading. Sexual violence against women, off page and serving only to create moral outrage in the main character or demonstrate the depravity of his foes, abounds in this book to an almost comical degree. (Almost, because it’s really gross, therefore hard to see the comedy.) Homophobic insults are also an offhand feature in the banter of the war games bros. Darrow at one point takes a slave from another castle because she says she can cook, and the sum total of later references to her surround her doing the cooking. There are women in positions of note and authority among Darrow’s classmates, but only because they lean into the hyper masculine culture of the war games established by majority-male leadership. And still they are described as “girls,” occasionally praised for being pretty or gentle, and are grouped together in the narrator’s internal thoughts when he makes decisions about who will fight and who will tend to other tasks.
Lack of 🌈
Aside from the aforementioned homophobic banter, there is no acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ persons, period. Much less actual representation. In a cast of future-humans so privileged by their wealth and caste they can do whatever they want, I find that as implausible as it is insensitive to the members of the reading community.
There is also a notable, strict gender binary, expressed by both Darrow and other characters. Honestly books that do the bare minimum—acknowledging that gender-queer persons exist—are so rare they thrill me. The ones that actually offer meaningful representation are incredibly hard to find. So, no surprise that this one fails in that respect but still, whenever a book uses “boys and girls” or “men and women” to refer to “all people,” the effect isn’t only lack of representation. It’s erasure.
tl;dr
Authors: if you’re going to build a vast, complex, technologically advanced future world where society is patriarchal, homophobic, and acknowledges only two genders, then you need to explain why it is the way it is, right there in the book.
If you do not, your silence on that topic will leave me with no choice but to assume you view those aspects of our present-day society as so inherent to human culture, so “natural,” that they are inevitable in any world, including the world you created.
So much of what draws me to speculative fiction is the opportunity to explore human potential, on an individual, political, and societal level. If you can’t offer me more than a transposition of my own, wearying reality, then you’ve missed an opportunity. And you’ve kind of pissed me off.
Did I like this book? In so many ways, yes. The premise, the style of prose, the fabulous narration (I read this one in audio), and the setting all drew me in from the first pages. Which was kind of the problem. More on that later. 😝
When I began reading, I had that fabulous sensation that I was embarking on an epic adventure I would never forget. The beginning of the book steeped me in the world, planted dozens of seeds of curiosity, and also made me fall slightly in love with the audiobook narrator. And then disappointment started setting in.
Pacing
The pacing in this book felt very strange to me. At the outset my impression was that this would be an immersive story told in a close point of view, but by the end of the book, despite the first person/present tense, there was nonetheless distance between myself and the action. With a few exceptions, mostly battle sequences, more than half of this book I experienced at a distance, observing a war games plot that interested me only marginally, deeply missing the feeling evoked by the early chapters.
I know what I’m describing is a pacing and style preference. I’ve not read many reviews of this book (yet) but I noticed a few preferred the pacing of the later part of the book above the “slow” beginning. But the inconsistency in pace is what throws me, as it set my expectations for a nuanced, emotional, character-driven book but ultimately delivered a broad-strokes sequence of events surrounding Darrow and his fellow students’ strategy games.
Stakes and tension
We all knew that the games were just games and wouldn’t matter after a winner was declared, so it was frustrating to spend the bulk of the book on events that didn’t prompt any noticeable evolution of the main character, Darrow, or deepen our understanding of Gold culture, the history of humanity in this world, or anything significant on a world building level. Save a few casual details about the way that the carvers had built hyped up versions of earth animals and stocked Mars with them, but this amounted to only a few lines. Still it was one of the few things I enjoyed about the majority of this book past the first act.
I clung to hope that if I could get through the long game of the “school,” the book would return to the themes that it introduced long enough to hook me in the beginning. But honestly, by the end I had lost hope of that and only kept reading because I knew this was the first book in a long, acclaimed series, and I’m willing to read at least one more to give the series a solid opportunity to redeem itself.
Misogyny
I left this critique for last, but in a way it was the aspect of the book that most negatively affected my experience. I heard another reviewer describe the misogyny in this narrative (which is objectively present, and readers who disagree need to really ruminate on their own concepts of gender and sexism) as feeling like a belief system from our world that leached into the world of the story. That is so well expressed and resonated with me immediately. Let me get into it…
I don’t mind misogyny existing in fiction. In fact, sometimes its total absence can test my suspension of disbelief to a point where I’m just as frustrated as if it had been present without basis, the way it is in this book. But when misogyny is present in a book written in this century, I expect it to be depicted thoughtfully and accurately, and consciously and deliberately challenged on the page. And if it’s present in a book written in this century and set several hundred years in the future, in a society that is sufficiently functional to have colonized and terraformed the entire solar system, then I expect it to make sense.
Misogyny cont’d (sexism)
In Red Rising, there are clear gender roles in the society of the Reds where Darrow grew up. Only men go into the mines. Women are revered by Darrow as being a source of beauty, gentleness, etc., that in some ways defies the dirty and brutal existence of his people. And he’s 16 when the book begins, so a kind of chivalrous version of misogyny works for his point of view. But he never evolves beyond this, expressing no surprise when he meets the rebels and one of them is a woman (who, like everyone else in this book, particularly the women, is described in a fashion that centers her attractiveness. She is beautiful on the unscarred half of her face. Even more beautiful, apparently, than the wife Darrow is still purportedly mourning). Readers are seemingly expected to interpret the world outside of the mines as more egalitarian among the sexes. Men can be “pinks,” the caste of people enslaved for the purpose of sexual gratification, and women can go to the war college that Darrow ultimately attends.
Yet many characters, not just Darrow, consistently center the concepts of leadership and honor around men. I could reread this book with a highlighter and capture every instance of this, or you could skim the book yourself and easily find examples. So which is it? Is the world gender egalitarian or strictly patriarchal? Or is it in some tense state of transition, like the world we live in? There isn’t enough nuance here to know. Which tells me that the author and editors weren’t giving it much thought. Which is disappointing and depressingly unsurprising.
Anyway, by the time the story events became overtly sexist misogynistic, I had more or less accepted that this book was going to miss an opportunity to say something interesting about gender, but I still became increasingly tempted to quit reading. Sexual violence against women, off page and serving only to create moral outrage in the main character or demonstrate the depravity of his foes, abounds in this book to an almost comical degree. (Almost, because it’s really gross, therefore hard to see the comedy.) Homophobic insults are also an offhand feature in the banter of the war games bros. Darrow at one point takes a slave from another castle because she says she can cook, and the sum total of later references to her surround her doing the cooking. There are women in positions of note and authority among Darrow’s classmates, but only because they lean into the hyper masculine culture of the war games established by majority-male leadership. And still they are described as “girls,” occasionally praised for being pretty or gentle, and are grouped together in the narrator’s internal thoughts when he makes decisions about who will fight and who will tend to other tasks.
Lack of 🌈
Aside from the aforementioned homophobic banter, there is no acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ persons, period. Much less actual representation. In a cast of future-humans so privileged by their wealth and caste they can do whatever they want, I find that as implausible as it is insensitive to the members of the reading community.
There is also a notable, strict gender binary, expressed by both Darrow and other characters. Honestly books that do the bare minimum—acknowledging that gender-queer persons exist—are so rare they thrill me. The ones that actually offer meaningful representation are incredibly hard to find. So, no surprise that this one fails in that respect but still, whenever a book uses “boys and girls” or “men and women” to refer to “all people,” the effect isn’t only lack of representation. It’s erasure.
tl;dr
Authors: if you’re going to build a vast, complex, technologically advanced future world where society is patriarchal, homophobic, and acknowledges only two genders, then you need to explain why it is the way it is, right there in the book.
If you do not, your silence on that topic will leave me with no choice but to assume you view those aspects of our present-day society as so inherent to human culture, so “natural,” that they are inevitable in any world, including the world you created.
So much of what draws me to speculative fiction is the opportunity to explore human potential, on an individual, political, and societal level. If you can’t offer me more than a transposition of my own, wearying reality, then you’ve missed an opportunity. And you’ve kind of pissed me off.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, War, and Violence
Moderate: Rape, Sexual assault, and Homophobia
emmalaya's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Colonisation, Violence, Death, Rape, Child death, Classism, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Sexism, and War
Moderate: Homophobia and Sexual violence
sonnybonobo's review
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
Plot dragged in areas that made it a struggle to finish. Most characters felt very flat, making it hard to remember who they were throughout the book. Sevro was the only character I truly enjoyed.
I had a really hard time finding anything like-able about the main character. We’re constantly told about the MCs motivations, but they don’t feel genuine throughout the book. Just constantly saying my wife, my wife, makes his motivations feel very superficial.
Pretty obvious misogyny bleeding through into the writing. Even outside of the sexual violence, women were often treated as objects of war and martyrs. The only substantial female character is of course the love interest and every interaction with her is overshadowed by MCs feelings toward her. Also constantly comparing her to his wife was weird as hell.
Also some casual homophobia that didn’t provide anything to the plot or characters. Just didn’t need to be there, making it really gross read through.
I had a really hard time finding anything like-able about the main character. We’re constantly told about the MCs motivations, but they don’t feel genuine throughout the book. Just constantly saying my wife, my wife, makes his motivations feel very superficial.
Pretty obvious misogyny bleeding through into the writing. Even outside of the sexual violence, women were often treated as objects of war and martyrs. The only substantial female character is of course the love interest and every interaction with her is overshadowed by MCs feelings toward her. Also constantly comparing her to his wife was weird as hell.
Also some casual homophobia that didn’t provide anything to the plot or characters. Just didn’t need to be there, making it really gross read through.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Murder, and War
Moderate: Rape, Slavery, Sexual assault, Misogyny, Homophobia, and Sexism
Minor: Cannibalism
jeggfriedrice's review
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Violence, and Murder
Moderate: Sexual assault, Rape, Sexism, and Homophobia
chelsea_is_reading's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Minor: Homophobia
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