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A review by sakusha
Red Rising by Pierce Brown

adventurous dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad 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

5.0

Like Wind Singer, this dystopian novel has society arranged by color. But while that other book was intended for a middle grade audience, this one is for young adults. Great song for this series: “Butterflies & Hurricanes” by Muse. Any page citations below are from the wide print edition.

Darrow is a married 16 year old living on Mars, working as a driller in the lowest rank of society, the reds. The opportunity presents itself where he can pretend to be a gold, the highest ranking class, and bring them down from the inside. After obtaining his gold disguise, he has to go to a school where he competes in a survival game against other gold teenagers, very similar to Hunger Games. I liked that the gold characters were not all evil (352, 624). The story was exciting and made me cry. I liked it enough to want to read the next books in the series.

There are a lot more colors in this book that in Wind Singer, and some are not explained much. Here’s what I gathered:
LowReds/rusters - lowest rank, miners of helium-3, live underground
Highreds - janitors, servants
Golds/Aureates - highest class, rulers, commanders
Bronzes - golds that have inferior appearance, lineage, and capabilities (142)
Pixie - golds that live hedonistically (142)
Pinks - prostitutes
Browns - medical assistants? (188)
Yellows  - study medicine and science
Obsidians/Crows - giant warriors who live in icy terrain
Grays/tinpots - soldiers?
Greens - develop technology
Blues - navigate stars
Violets - artists, rare (135)
Coppers - bureaucrats, managers, data analysts? (53)
Silvers - count and manipulate money and logistics (126)
Whites - judges, philosophers? Rare (126, 135)

“Goldbrows’ first loyalty is to color, then family, then planet, then House. Most Houses are dominated by one or two powerful families. On Mars, the Family Augustus, the Family Bellona, and the Family Arcos influence all others” (212).

Minor complaint - some things were unrealistic or didn’t make sense:

  1. They go through a lot of trouble to transform Darrow from a red to a gold. They have to basically remake his body. But Darrow keeps his lowcolor name and the wedding band on his finger (198). These things should give away that he isn’t a gold. And these things would’ve been so easy to change too.
  2. After Darrow has become a gold, he lives in a “high-rise penthouse” (193) where he gets visited by the Board of Quality Control. It wasn’t explained how he got this home. I’m assuming it belongs to Mickey the Carver, Matteo the pink, or the Sons of Ares. Regardless, wouldn’t the society have record of who owns/rents which places? So wouldn’t they have known it if a gold was living there? And how would Mickey, Matteo, or the Sons of Ares be able to afford a place fit for a gold?
  3. “If the Reds of Lykos thought they could actually win the Laurel, they would be so much more productive” (449). This is narration by Darrow, but he and the other reds already *did* think they could win the laurel through merit, up until Darrow discovered they couldn’t.
  4. “‘The lower colors have their children by use of catalysts. Fast births, sometimes only five months of gestation before labor is induced. Except for the Obsidians, only we wait nine months to be born. Our mothers receive no catalysts, no sedatives, no nucleics. Have you asked yourself why?’ ‘So the product can be pure.’ ‘And so that nature is given a chance to kill us. The Board of Quality Control is firmly convinced that 13.6213% of all Gold children should die before one year of age. Sometimes they make reality fit this number.’ He splays out his thin hands. ‘Why? Because they believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature’s work so that we do not become a soft race’” (243). This doesn’t make sense because the third trimester is not a dangerous time for babies, and taking the baby prematurely actually puts it more at risk than letting it come when it’s ready. And if the golds didn’t want a soft race, then why do they raise their children in luxury instead of preparing them for the passage and institute?

“The first test, the Passage, was the measurement of necessity versus emotion. The second was tribal strife. Then there was a bit of justice” (372-373).

“‘Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own decadence.’ 
He tells us how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names. 
‘Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself form the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie—the idea that men are brothers and are created equal.’
Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens’ suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping.
‘Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!’
There’s more laugher across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy.
‘Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United STates of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. It is against the NobleLie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our Society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into decadence.’ He speaks of the Pixies.
‘You are the best of humanity. But you have been coddled. You have been treated like children. Were you born to a different color, you would have calluses. You would have scars. You would know pain.’ He smiles as if he knows pain. I hate this man. ‘You think you know pain. You think the Society is an inevitable force of history. You think Her the end of history. But many have thought that before. Many ruling classes have believed theirs to be the last, the pinnacle. They grew soft. Fat. They forgot that calluses, wounds, scars, hardship, preserve all those fine pleasure clubs you young boys love to frequent and all those fine silks and diamonds and unicorns young girls ask for on birthdays’” (207-209).
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