A review by sclark99
Red Rising by Pierce Brown

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

2.75

Oof, okay. It's not that it's bad. It's weirdly hyper-masculine. There are some decent female characters but there's also a gratuitous amount of (off-screen)
sexual assault
of 16 year old girls, which is only a narrative tool for our already extremely rageful protag to get even more angry and righteous. 

From the first Part of the book, I thought it was going to be a sci-fi Mistborn. It turned out more like a darker Hunger Games. Pretty much nothing revolution-wise happened in this book at all. The protag gets suped up and participates in the fucked-up games the upper class uses to advance their "best and brightest" -- very Ender's Game meets Hunger Games. Everyone he meets is either a good guy or a Nazi. He doesn't do anything when members of his team
rape
"slaves" they have taken. He eventually kills the dude who condoned/allowed it, and afterwards
finds out that he had been a Red the whole time, also
.  Is there anyone in this book we are allowed to like? I get that it's dystopian, but ffs at least make your protag likeable. He says he's fueled by rage but underneath that is love, but it's hard to believe. He spends the majority of the book completely dissociated from his people, and I get that he's getting prepared to be a revolutionary leader or whatever, but it's just... I don't know. It doesn't work for me. 

It's also really, really derivative. There is absolutely nothing in this book that feels fresh or innovative. It's rich people bad and have no loyalty, poor people love their family and don't know how the world is screwing them over. Darrow is clever but it's never really emphasized. He just sort of seems to do things that work all the time. Not to say he doesn't make mistakes, but his failures tend to be more other people betraying or failing him rather than him making the wrong choices. 

There is no "red rising" in this book. I don't really care to read about more entitled teenagers being destructive and arrogant. I want to be able to root for my protagonist, not just his cause. There are ways to write characters like Darrow -- Kelsier from Mistborn comes to mind. (He's older, but he's a rage and vengeance-driven lower class citizen willing to do whatever it takes to break the social order including infiltrating the ruling class... they have a lot in common.) Not portrayed as a perfect person.

This isn't a particularly well-thought out review but it's my 2 cents. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I'm doing to do more research on the rest of the series to decide if I want to give the sequel a chance -- presumably it's not going to be in this weird feudal battle royale setting. If it has less  
rape
and more politics and actual revolution I would be interested. I like the setting, more than a lot of dystopian settings. I like the logic of it. Color-coded caste systems are a little passe but they work well enough in stories. I really wish there was more sci-fi in this sci-fi dystopia. That's another thing I imagine will be more present in later books, given that they presumably won't be in an isolated, nearly technology-free setting. 

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