A review by ainsleym
Red Gambit by Luke R. Mitchell

fast-paced

3.0

Things I liked:

• The action scenes were really well done! It was easy to tell where all of the characters were, what they were doing, and what the physical spaces they were in looked like. 
• The characters, while clearly very good fighters, still seemed very balanced and could suffer consequences, even if not very serious ones. I didn’t think that any of our main characters would die, but I didn’t know if they would succeed in their objectives for each fight. 
• Rachel’s mix of magic and technology was super cool—I would’ve liked even more detail on how it worked, but I liked it overall. 
• The second half of the book set up the Resistance and the larger world well. Unfortunately, that leads me to:

Things I didn’t like:

• The first half of the book. There was no sense of a larger scale or consequences until
  they find Alaric and team up with him.
   
• Although Jarek’s concept was interesting, he was irritating to read about for the majority of the book. Even though
  he has this backstory about being unable to help people/improve the world which made him jaded
  , he didn’t act like that until the latter part of the book and I would’ve liked to see that earlier instead of only his wise-cracking, womanizer personality 🙄
• The humor was also overdone, in my opinion. When every single line was meant to be snarky, most of the jokes didn’t land. It also made Jarek sound more juvenile than I think he was intended to be. 

It’s not groundbreaking and the first half does a massive disservice to the rest of the book, but overall this was a decently fun, fast-paced book with good concepts and a very readable writing style. Thank you to StoryGraph and Luke Mitchell for hosting the giveaway for this book!