A review by wardenred
Red Rising by Pierce Brown

adventurous dark 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

3.0

Life is the most effective school ever created.

I feel like I’ve made a mistake in picking this up as an audiobook. The writing style is the kind I can better perceive, perhaps even enjoy, when I see the words in front of me on the page. In  this format, though, it ended up being kind of distracting and almost dense, which likely colored my perception of the story to some extent.

As for the story itself… Well, plenty of people have recced it to me with a comment that this first book is deliberately crafted to match the Hunger Games-style tropes popular at the time, but grows into something more unique and expansive in the latter books. That sounded super interesting in theory, but now I’m not so sure if I want to continue to those latter books, tbh. Maybe I’d rather re-read Hunger Games.

I wouldn’t call the book bad, and I’m actually really impressed by the worldbuilding. A lot of it is really intricate and thought-provoking. I also generally like plots focused on going undercover to stay among the enemies, and this one has its awesome moments. But in general, there were just too many aspects here that aren’t to my taste. For example, I’m definitely a character-first reader, and here all the characters just so obviously exist as vehicle for the plot and the themes. This was hard for me to vibe with.

I also found the way all the brutal violence is handled here off-putting. Not just the quantities of it, but like, the way it was spoken about? Maybe it’s at least partially on the narrator, but I felt like it was constantly crossing into torture porn territory. Finally, the pacing was just too rocky, with a loooong expositin that had me wondering if the inciting incident would ever occur, then big sections moving at breakneck speed around the middle/in the second half of the story, making an already dense story with lots of characters harder too follow. 

All in all, lots of cool ideas here (and really great worldbuilding!), but I’m not sure the author is for me.
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