Reviews with content warning for Violence - Dark Age

I have so many thoughts, words, opinions, theories, and things I want to scream about. This book was intense in so many ways. Battle scenes, birth scenes, political scenes, this series has everything in it.

However, it is not for the faint of heart! There is gore, violence, betrayal, death, massacre, and so much more. I have definitely enjoyed reading this series (so far, book 6 is still in production), but I definitely think it's time for a breather to process all that just happened.

Obviously, this being a fifth book I don't want to give anything away for the preview books. However, I will warn that Pierce Brown is not the top to save all the favorite characters. I appreciate that because it's more like real life.

I've mentioned before that this series is of the Fantasy and Sci-fi genres. Definitely a very different read with a very different idea from many others I've read.

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elfflame's review against another edition

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I don't know why I even got this far. The writing itself is excellent, the world (universe?) is fascinating, and the characters are interesting. But the violence is so omnipresent, it feels like there's no reason to even get to know them, as they will just die in a book or two. After the attack on Mustang, I just had to stop. I shouldn't even have tried to get this far, really. If you don't like violence, this is not the series to read.

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dgrachel's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Getting to the end of a Red Rising novel is like surviving the Passage. There have been many tears, moments of hope (to quote Ted Lasso: it’s the hope the kills you), a few laughs, and even a moment that made me scream and caused my entire household, dog included, to come running to see if I was okay. I have so much more I want to say, but I’m exhausted. I’m not ready for the final book. Take your time, Pierce. I know it will be bloodydamn brilliant when it comes.

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leahsbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

While I flew through the other books in this series in a day or two, it took me quite a while to get through this one. The book was a little slower moving at first than the previous ones, and the points of view were handled a little differently. Rather than bouncing back and forth between all of the characters, it was broken up between the sections, so that we only see a little bit of the picture at a time. It left me feeling as though I was always missing out on what was happening to other characters.

There was a LOT of stuff going on, all at the same time. All of the main characters have their own story line, and it didn’t really become clear how they interconnected until late in the book. The story is brutal, gory, and tense all throughout the book. There is no shortage of battles, and the pervading feeling I carried throughout my reading was “oh man, this is bad, how much worse can it get?” But of course, whenever I thought that, it got worse, every bloodydamn time. Not a single character escaped unscathed.

There was something so fundamentally off about reading Darrow’s chapters without Sevro by his side. It shows how much he really leans on him, and values the support he provides.

“A life of war is catching up with me. She doesn’t know the weight I carry. How much I relied on Sevro to help carry it.”

We get to see a lot more from Virginia’s POV than usual, and I really love her character. She’s brilliant, level-headed, and logical, but this book showcases more of her emotional side. Her loyalty, her passion, and her fears are on display for the first time, and it makes her so much more relatable.

“What good is being smarter than everyone if no one listens? Is this how my father felt? My brother? Is evil born of pure frustration?”

Over the course of the series, we’ve seen Lysander grow up. He didn’t have an easy go of things in the last 2 books, but I just struggled so much with him in this book. He learned a lot about life in this book, and was exposed to new experiences when he went to war for the first time. But I grew to like him a lot less over the course of this book.

“From a distance, death seems the end of a story. But when you are near, when you can smell the burning skin, see the entrails, you see death for what it is. A traumatic cauterization of a life thread. No purpose. No conclusion. Just snip.”

Sevro isn’t a huge part of the story in this book, and I was so disappointed not to see him as much as usual, since he’s one of my favorite characters in the entire series. He’s always been a little off, but he serves an important purpose in the Republic. Even if people don’t always agree with his methods, everyone knows that they’re effective:

“I’ll never get used to seeing the fear Sevro wakes in people. Deep down they know Darrow is operating on a framework of logic. No one, not even me, believes that Sevro is completely sane.”

As has become my custom when reading this series, I always consider changing my “gasp factor” to something else, because I don’t just gasp, I actually start exclaiming “HOLY SHIT!” Yeah, it’s serious. Once I got past the slow moving part, it just felt like the action start coming faster and faster and never stopped. The ending didn’t feel like an ending as much as a cliffhanger/to be continued, and I honestly wish that the next book had a release date so I’m not just left pining for a book without even having a clue when it is going to be available. The struggle is so real y’all. But I’m 10000% sure it’s going to break my heart into tiny little pieces, because this one already did. But I have no regrets because it’s amazing.

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thefoxyreader's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The middle book in a trilogy always has the chance to just be filler. To be the book whose only objective is to act as a bridge to get its characters to the exciting finale. The sad middle child, forgotten in reviews of the entire series.

With death, destruction, and dark character moments, Pierce Brown delivers the Red Rising Saga’s The Empire Strikes Back entry with the unbelievably bold Dark Age.

While Iron Gold was a breath of fresh air with new perspectives, Dark Age adds the new voice of Virginia and takes all of our main characters to the utter depths of despair as they navigate the oncoming war. Here’s a brief summary of where our main heroes are:

Darrow: If there’s one thing we can count on The Reaper for it’s to make bad decisions that result in catastrophic loss of life. Darrow continues the war on Mercury while struggling with his decision to prioritize the world and his ideals over his family.

Virgina: Virginia struggles with the same dilemma as her husband, Darrow, but has the trickier job of trying to outsmart her opponents with rhetoric and policy as she encounters political strife and there is an obvious traitor within her circle that led in the kidnapping of her son and niece.

Lysander: Setting out to prove himself and his family’s legacy in his first battle, Lysander discovers that war is not as elegant as the poets and scribes described. It may cost him everything he’s ever held dear.

Ephraim: On the run with Pax and Elektra, Ephraim lands himself in the middle of Sefi and the Obsidians. He is given the opportunity to train them, but with so many enemies, does Ephraim even have a choice?

Lyria: After being abducted by Victra, Lyria remains in captivity with only notes from Volga through a vent as her companion. Will she escape to get revenge on the Red Hand who killed her family? Or will she become a pin cushion for Victra’s own revenge?

There’s A LOT that happens in this book. It’s 750 pages and I never felt like a page was wasted. I still adore Ephraim, and Brown’s gift of writing clever dialogue really excels in his chapters. I also really enjoyed Lyria’s character arc as well.

While I initially groaned at seeing Virginia had chapters in this, I ended up appreciating her character and viewpoint more.

The incredible twist that happens in her chapters had me cackling in delight, which obviously helped.

I read this with the Nerdy Girls of Northwest Arkansas series book club, and our group was split on whether we liked it or not. The arguments for not liking it mainly revolved around the book being violent for violence’s sake and just utterly devoid of hope.

I disagree with that assessment. While it is dark, there is a certain amount of realism that Brown retains in his science fiction series. This is war, and you cannot have war without having major loss, whether it’s loss of life, loss of hope, or loss of innocence. He makes the stakes incredibly high throughout the book, and characters are either rewarded or literally gutted for decisions they make.

I respect authors that take their characters to the lowest point before building them back up. As I likened Dark Age to The Empire Strikes Back, this book ends on a seriously dark note, but I also can’t help but feel that it’s going to wrap up on a positive note in the next installment that I am now excitedly waiting for.

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dosymedia's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

While Dark Age, published by an American author in 2018, cannot actively comment on the events of 2020 and 2021, reading this book during the final six months of Trump's presidency was a fucking head trip whose horrific verisimilitude culminated in an act of domestic terrorism on the nation's Capitol. Our dystopia is here and we don't get to have the neon-soaked inventions of our narratives, rather, it's the terror and confusion so well exemplified in the latest entrant in the Red Rising saga.

Dark Age is the fifth installment in a series that has evolved in depth. The first trilogy, starting with Red Rising, is a fast, action-packed science fiction series following Darrow, a slave who infiltrates society's elite to realize his wife's dream of equality. Reflecting his age, Darrow is an idealist who struggles to nurture love and compassion in an inhospitable society in the first trilogy. Darrow is hardened by the second trilogy, his idealism still a delicate flame that drives him to incredible feats, but the questions he asks himself are those that come with maturation: what is his role in prepping the next generation of sons, can the democracy that he helped to established decades ago survive him, and can a democracy created from bloody revolution be sustained?

And honey, the glow-up is tremendous. While sustaining the incredible pacing and intricate plotting of the first trilogy, the second trilogy has improved on all fronts, primarily drawing on the strength of its characters by expertly intertwining plot with character in such a way as to make every new development perfectly damaging to my poor heart.

Red Rising has always been a series that preferred rule of cool in its worldbuilding over realism, and in Dark Age that inclination is fully embraced, introducing huge worldbuilding elements that push it towards science fantasy; the series wears its technology as costume whilst the thrust of its what-ifs are in its society and politics, which it happily unpacks by exploring the depraved depths of its significant players. Dark Age is most interested in people and why they do what they do, like why the "good" commits evil, the various ways in which we express cruelty towards others, and the ways in which we reframe our actions to fit within personal narratives. It does this by showing the wild thrashing of a powerful, entitled class realizing its end and doing everything within their power to return to a status quo that caters to them. Unlike the real world, its heroes and villains are easy to pick out -- being in support or in opposition of slavery is a pretty easy moral barometer -- but its nuance is in the method by which heroes achieve their ends.

It's that character exploration that truly hooked me. And I was surprised that even those that I've had a relatively short time with wormed their way into my heart. Brown is aware of the readers' emotional vulnerability and he doesn't flinch at exposing it, cutting characters down in a myriad of difficult ways that by some miracle managed tears from this otherwise apathetic reader. While it became clearer to me Brown's pattern for early elimination, I felt that because each character arc is opened and closed so well, therefore signaling the character's imminent danger, that each cruelty enacted within the second trilogy was well earned, and the heartaches induced each respected and treated meaningfully, with the characters and text calling back to earlier losses and sacrifices to remember the friends that contributed to their lives. It's a mark of skill that I was able to mourn earnestly alongside the characters and that each and every death could be carried with me as if they were family. I appreciate this idea that our sacrifices aren't nothing, that their impact on the ones left behind mean something, even if our actions hadn't accomplished what we desired.

That emotional resonance made Dark Age a five star book; I haven't felt such uncompromised adoration within the series since Golden Son, but because I spent a significant portion of my read also analyzing the handling of queer representation and gender, I found some fumbled social issues worth critiquing.

Gold society likes to pat itself on the back for being progressive in comparison to their predecessors, primarily in the areas of sexuality and gender, but there's little in the narrative and worldbuilding that actually supports evidence of that. Worse, the narrative appears to condone the ableist notions of its textual world.

While queer characters are present, they've yet to be allowed to exist on page in the same way that straight characters have. Straight characters have been able to voice their sexual and romantic desires (with the penultimate chapter even including a brief male-female sex scene), but queer characters haven't been seen in the same loving relationships, nor has a queer protagonist truly spoken on their sexuality in the same way that Darrow has. With even that kind of representation missing, it seems like too much to ask for more, like say an aromantic character that isn't depicted as a psychopath. And it seems an even more unrealistic expectation to see queerness reflected in the society itself; there's very little queering within Gold society. Bisexuality is accepted and same-sex marriages exist, but that's basically it.

Queer rights doesn't begin and end at the inclusion in heterosexual rituals. There should be an overall questioning of traditional structures, such as alternative family arrangements, that show a society that has made room for difference. What comes closest to touching upon this idea is cloning as an alternative for natural childbirth. Kavax tells his son, Daxos, that he would love for his son to give him grandchildren, regardless of their partner's gender since, "cloning is always an option," albeit a subpar one, according to Kavax. While this shows on its face a sexually liberal society, it's still one governed by western sexuality and its interest in maintaining blood lineage through natural procreation. The ways in which their society approaches this issue is the way we do today, with natural birth positioned as the best option while alternatives are decidedly second-rate, even unnatural or creepy.

Where the series has so far excelled as far as queer representation is its inclusion of Ephraim, who is a gay man depicted with the same amount of pathos as Darrow; he's interesting, complex, and his narrative has nothing to do with his sexuality, despite Ephraim being the widower of a tertiary character first introduced in the original trilogy. In fact, Ephraim's narrative intertwines with Darrow's on the themes of fatherhood and both despair as they come to new understandings about the meaning of and importance of home and family. And its their conclusions regarding these themes that drive these characters' action, for better or for worst. While there is still legitimate criticism of Ephraim as he relates to his queerness within the narrative, I was floored by how much I came to love his character.

Gold society is obsessed with domination and thus much of their language and ideology is mired in this idea. This has led to an inherently ableist society, but the book then reinforces their ableism through Liam, a Red boy who was born blind and who has his blindness magicked away as an act of kindness. To do this without giving Liam a voice is frankly gross. As Elsa Sjunneson pointed out on an episode of Worldbuilding for Masochists, a character such as Liam would have their life fundamentally changed if their blindness was suddenly taken from them; their blindness is natural to them, they have always known it, and to suddenly make them see would be incredibly disorienting, forcing them to process information that they never grew up to understand. It's ableist to assume that he would want to be changed to be more like the able-bodied rather than considering that what he may prefer tools to make his life within a world that wasn't made for people like him easier.

Permanent disfigurement is also used as a means to separate the good from the bad, with the book's most villainous bearing noticeable facial scarring or body disfigurement whilst the valorous always have their beauty fully restored.

From interviews, I suspect that these missteps are the results of a straight white man that hasn't really wrestled with these questions before, but I feel it's really, truly telling that Brown has included a major queer character in his series after seeing how his first trilogy resonated with queer readers. If he improves on this front in the future or if his handling of these topics reveal a stagnant pattern, time will only tell, but at present I remain optimistic.

If you're the sort of person who turns to narrative to better understand the world and who flocks towards difficult subjects as they become particularly relevant in your own life, the Red Rising saga is a series for right now -- it takes its dystopia seriously and unpacks its repercussions, centering the humanity within each and every character exactly so we can understand how our worst impulses surface.

TLDR: Darrow is daddi & the Red Rising saga is brooding action daddi fic, perfect for those that enjoy the action and worldbuilding of series like John Wick, but would like a dash of Shakespearean melodrama added to their Machiavellian politics. Also, space swords.

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nerdylari's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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izzy_reads's review against another edition

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5.0

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