Reviews with content warning for Medical trauma - Red Rising

Reviews tagging 'Medical trauma'

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

20 reviews

tiana_king's review against another edition

adventurous dark reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Somehow a mix between Outlander, The Hunger Games, and 1984. But put it in space ✨ Sometimes the main character irritated me with his impulsivity and naïveté but then I’d remember he’s 17 so I’m sure that was on purpose.

Content Warnings

jordannahamel's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense slow-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

4.5

Ok so, where to begin.

Red Rising is absolutely without a doubt not for the faint of heart both in content and commitment. If Hunger Games, Battle Royale and Game of Thrones with a dash of the Roman Empire had a fucked up baby, it would be Darrow and Red Rising. Thats not to say that I didnt enjoy it, because I absolutely did. But this was a heavy book to read for me even if it wasnt that long of a book.

To start, I was not expecting for the story to go the way it did. I was anticipating a much more straightforward dystopian burn the system down narrative (which I still believe will be the overarching theme) but it evolved into something much more gritty and less straightforward.

Darrow starts off as someone who sees the system only 2 inches from his face and then quite literally gets a full picture view. It changes him from being someone just trying to keep their head down and do the best they can for their family and turns him into a war lord hell bent on burning the system down from the inside out - in time. His character is overhauled inside and out to the point that throughout reading I had a hard time remembering the boy first introduced to the man that emerges through the blood, war and violence of Red Rising. Character development is in the form of "I'm not just going to be better, I'm going to be worse" and honestly, good for Darrow. Im anticipating lots of world building from the remaining books in the series, but I'm looking forward to it and how it will change Darrow's character even further.

I took points off for the pacing during the "war games" portion of the book and quite frankly the writing of RR's female characters. The former: I absolutely understand the point and lesson's Darrow & Co. receive throughout this part of the book. It forces them to be calculating, cruel and learn on the fly when entering a cut throat academy. However, it was a long and slow process filled with the violence and gore that can only come from tribal war games, which was a bit exhausting at times.

For the latter critique: I wouldn't go so far as to say the female characters were poorly written but the most prominent ones fell into the dreaded categories of "untrustworthy bitch" and "pure, Mother Mary" who only seemed to serve the purpose of pushing Darrow's character arc further at their own expense and make him the "protector" of the story. Namely Mustang, Antonia, and Eo.

Eo is literally killed off as a means to propel Darrow into action, which felt a little cheap and made her the sacrificial pure lamb of Darrow's story, when honestly the murder of his father could have been used in the exact same way. Antonia is literally introduced as the crazy sexy hot bitch who is untrustworthy if any man gets close to her. Darrow is mocked for liking Mustang and trusting her when he has no reason to doubt her (only up until the reveal of her being Lucian's twin) but it is asserted over and over she is a woman using her feminine wiles to trick him - I say this because Sevro's intentions are NEVER doubted where Mustangs continuously are. To add insult to injury, the Proctors kidnap her and of course Darrow has to save her (especially when he could not with Eo), a damsel in distress narrative she herself acknowledges! Furthermore, Mustang's entire presence is there to keep Darrow alive and drive HIS wants forward, a fact that the Apollo Proctor also directly calls out. Listen, I enjoyed the book and still enjoyed all of the characters but the pitfalls it seems every male dominated fantasy novel gives into with its female characters and female specific violence (dont even get me started on the rape in this book and Darrow's idea of "justice" whilst maintaining his power) was still extremely prevalent in Red Rising

.

TLDR; Would I recommend this book? Absolutely - just not for someone under the age of 16 lol. Do I have my own critiques of it, absolutely. It is not a perfect book but after a good break and maybe a change in content, I'm excited to see where Darrow's story goes.

Content Warnings

ka_ke's review against another edition

Go to review page

I got bored. The book is predictably dystopian.

I’m all for rallying the people against the oppressors, I think these stories are truly important, however there has to be a way to get the point across in less pages or with faster pacing.

Also… you can tell a hetero-cis-male wrote the series.

Content Warnings

linneak's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark inspiring tense medium-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

4.5

Content Warnings

moonchild_cos's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

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

3.5

Content Warnings

thrabenvaliant's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional inspiring tense fast-paced

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

5.0

What a wild ride. I didn't expect it to go where it did, or cover the ground it did. I'm left surprised and intrigued.

Content Warnings

kagey's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging hopeful sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

chris_reads's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark inspiring sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

grets_reads's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

gailbird's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark tense medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I have mixed feelings about this book, but because the predominant feelings during the majority of it ended up being really positive, it gets a high rating. But I have to still address the dissenting impressions I had throughout reading: the main reason for that being that I felt like I was reading several different books. The first thing I thought with the introduction of the powerful Golds and the oppressed Reds was that this was like Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, except with Gold as the dominant class instead of Silver. (Though Rising came out the year before Queen.) But then the other colours were introduced and a bit more of the world was built, and I realised it was repackaged Brave New World, except that the Golds are a bunch of idiots in comparison to Mustapha Mond. Honestly, if you intend to genetically engineer your different “castes” to physically match their assigned colour, then you should also genetically engineer them with literally only the cognitive capabilities to perform their assigned duties so that they don’t revolt. Just a thought.

However, the explanation for how propaganda kept the lower orders of Reds in line is very The Island and made for an interesting, if foreseeable, revelatory twist that helped set the protagonist on his path—of course, there is a more problematic catalyst to get this Red clod Darrow to start clawing his way to the surface, which I’ll get to. The twisted dynamic of the government creating shared guilt through forcing the population’s complicity in horrific acts was also fascinating and it was woven with powerful effect throughout the novel. The first part of the book is the shortest, yet it literally felt like the longest, it dragged so much and the worldbuilding has so little impact on the rest of the story. In this section, Darrow’s wife Eo tells him she dreams of a world where Reds are free, and their prospective children might have a life of choice and autonomy. Darrow basically says he doesn’t share her dream—she’s his dream.

And she’s just like, well, if you feel that way, I guess I have to get myself out of the way. Forget prospective children. And she essentially commits an act of treason that she knows will end in her execution in order to motivate Darrow to take up arms.

Why was she so insistent it had to be Darrow who spearheaded the revolution? Why couldn’t she have gotten involved in the revolutionary efforts herself

(short of committing open treason and getting herself killed immediately)

and let Darrow come at his own pace?

To me, it just felt like we had to get the wife fridged as soon as possible so the real main character could get on his “chosen one” journey. It felt forced, cheap and, dare I say it, like it was just necessary to leave room for a love story later on—I liked the love story later on, but I didn’t like how Eo was shelved in order for it to be possible.

Why couldn’t Darrow have actually been a self-motivated individual, who was mad enough when he lost the Laurel to fight against the system? Not every hero has to be reluctant; let’s get over that right now.

He already had dead family members who could have been motivation; Eo didn’t have to get herself killed just to prove a point that had already been proven ad nauseam.

What’s worse is

Eo’s death

wasn’t even sufficient to motivate him—it was some rando revolutionaries in the second part of the book that he’d never even met or identified with who eventually did that. (The Sons of Ares were criminally underutilized—they just turned into deus e machina to get Darrow out of one place and into another to get the plot moving. I sincerely hope they get more development in the later books.) It just felt all wrong how it played out. Then it turns into a Gattaca story, where the protagonist has to undergo extreme plastic surgery, reconstruction, and all sorts of horrific delights in order to transform him from the lowest caste to the highest—because, remember, the difference is all in the appearance, which makes it an easy system to hack. Darrow doesn’t even break a sweat competing with the Golds intellectually, even though he’s lived his entire life as an uneducated worker ant. A little bit of cerebral enhancement and absorbing great works of literature, philosophy, and strategy through osmosis while you sleep is totally all you need to be on par with these born and bred overachievers—because, again, Golds were more concerned about making sure everyone had the right colour of eyes than that everyone they wanted to keep below them were actually intellectually below them. It’s never very clear what he’s specifically supposed to accomplish once he gets in—take over the entire government? Presumably after he’s cleared the first round (i.e. this first book), the rebels who helped him get on this road in the first place will contact him with more concrete plans. Seems like if you go to all the trouble and risk of faking someone into a higher echelon of society, you would want to make sure to give them some solid instructions and keep tabs on them so they didn’t go off-book and blow the whole thing—like Titus. This part is a typical transition section that serves a function but isn’t too gripping in and of itself, although it does have a killer ending that hit really hard. (There’s a rather dark pun in my last phrase if you’ve read the book.)

Of course, Darrow does get into the Institute which will be his gateway to higher society—which turns very quickly into a Camp Half-Blood game of capture the flag if it was with Hunger Games rules and timeline. They draw the comparison to capture the flag themselves, I’m not making that up. Also, there are scenes reminiscent of Ender’s Game as the proctor reappears at periodic moments throughout, a little bit paunchier and more stressed each time, like Graff, as he watches the unpredictable moves Darrow is making. Darrow is also an Ender-ish character, who does what he has to to win… except he doesn’t take responsibility for it, not really. It’s society that has made him do it. The grand point of the plot gets a bit fuddled during the War Games section, and while it’s about the most gripping, interesting part of the entire book, it feels like it’s a different story than we started with. This might be because Darrow himself gets a bit lost in the person he has become: there is an element of “To fight them, you must become them” type of reasoning Darrow comes to ascribe to. Which, while true the society created the conditions for it, doesn’t mean he is free of all culpability in how he chooses to respond to their false dichotomy—he’s supposed to be so freaking good at “extrapolational thinking,” can’t he come up with a third option when he’s placed in a kill or be killed scenario? Maybe not, but then he needs to own up to what he’s doing. On the other hand, because he doesn’t, it creates some of the greatest tension and executions of betrayal I’ve read. So I guess it makes for good drama, but a flawed character.

Within the games, his alliances fall apart, realign, expand, contract, and slowly he gains a legion of loyal, willing followers who revere his persona as “Reaper,” the sign being a curved blade… is the USSR imagery too subtle? Red? Sickle? Bringing down the hierarchy? No? Okay. In the third and fourth parts, the pace is fast and it skips time easily and smoothly, not leaving Darrow too much dead time to evaluate the greater societal meaning to the immediate situation—which is realistic and keeps the momentum pushing strongly forward through the latter half of the book. The realizations Darrow does have are natural and come out of his experiences—he doesn’t sit around philosophizing and having CW show heart-to-hearts with everybody in order to artificially stimulate some kind of emotional connection in the reader. I appreciated how the character development and arc comes directly out of the plot and incident surrounding it. Darrow shows his best qualities as a strategist and a leader while in this hyper-reality, forming alliances and friendships with the Gold kids that make him realise that they are all people, which causes internal conflict because of what they as a whole have done to oppress his class. It’s a compelling insight into Darrow, given tangible form in his evolving relationships with Cassius and Mustang, even while he remembers

the execution of his wife Eo

at the hands of the Golds. The arc with him and Cassius is the high point of the novel for me. I like Mustang too,

who, after they have a Peeta-dying-in-a-cave-and-Katniss-sneaking-out-for-medicine moment—twice—comes to be Darrow’s friend, advisor, lieutenant, and eventual love interest. Speaking of Hunger Games moments, the assault on Mount Olympus was very nightshade berries to me, except on a grander, more overt scale.

Again, these Golds are incompetent in comparison to almost every other totalitarian state in dystopian novels. But it was satisfying, I’ll grant.

What was not satisfying was the introduction of “the Jackal” out of a clear blue sky, who, stereotypically, was House Pluto and was framed as a big bad rival of Darrow/Reaper’s. Who is he? What did he do? Besides cannibalism, it was never specified that the Jackal did anything clever as far as tactics.

The closest he came was setting the trap for Darrow and that didn’t work.

And there was definitely no known personal element between him and Darrow to give their “rivalry” weight.

Everything the Jackal got was because the proctors helped him. It wasn’t Reaper against Jackal, it was Reaper against the proctors. And, again, they didn’t do a very good job of “favouring” the Jackal, if they literally left him to kill half his own House in an attempt to avoid capture by another House and eat a bunch more in an attempt to survive after he’d trapped himself.

But yet those very things he actually did himself gave him such potential as a character—he was a survivor. His willingness to do anything to muscle his way through a situation is a fascinating quality, and one that could have been compared with Darrow’s innovation for working around things.

But no, we just get a clinically insane stereotype easily despatched at the end.

And the “personal” connection that was revealed fell rather flat. The Jackal could have been a paperweight for all the development he got. Escort this man to the lower echelons, please. Let him be a helldiver, he’s got the guts for it, and literally nothing else. I would have liked more Cassius instead: more of the rivalry between him and Darrow. There was such tragedy in their relationship and its betrayal that would have made for a much more impactful showdown than the mediocre one with the Jackal. (And don’t get me started on how bland the other Big Bad, Augustus, is. I guess when you’re the person directly responsible for a loved one’s death, you don’t need a personality to be seen as worthy of hate, which is fair.)

All things considered, this book elicited a lot of reactions, feelings, thoughts, and analyses from me, which is something it couldn’t have done had I not gotten invested. I will definitely read the rest of the series.

Content Warnings

More...