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A review by zephyrscape
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
I enjoyed the story for the most part, although it felt like the author kept trying to drill it into us that we couldn't have nice things. I'm not taking off stars for that in my review, since this *is* a dystopian story after all, but the pretty relentless pace at times of bad things happening at times ended up pretty quickly just making me shrug my shoulders and avoid getting particularly attached to any one character/relationship between characters, which feels like it wasn't the intent... I didn't even come close to crying at any point while reading, and it feels like I was supposed to.
What I *am* lowering my rating for, though, is how the book felt like it was meant to tell a deep story about the imperfections of a society while also (seemingly unconsciously?) assuming as right and natural some of the worse parts of our own society. For example, the female characters all felt pretty flat to me. I felt like I was watching cardboard cutouts that either existed to be put on a pedestal, or to be motherly, or to be shy and vulnerable, or to be tempting to Darrow. (Even a female character that is referred to as "the brightest" by Darrow himself mostly exists to bounce his own ideas off of; the actual ideas that turn the plot all come from him. Also there are plenty of jabs of "like a girl," etc. that I think we as readers are supposed to think are witty and clever.) I also found myself very uncomfortable at times with how rape felt like it was just sprinkled into the plot, and especially with thetrivially simple redemption arc for one would-be rapist , as well as with the conflation of being paid for sex with being raped at a couple of points. Also the book felt VERY heterosexual-- which is fine! I get that a lot of books will not include queerness, BUT-- in a way that totally shut off/made fun of the closest things to queerness happening in the background (two men in close proximity, etc.). And again, I get that that's to be expected in a lot of books. But all of these things put together were just especially disappointing for a book that's attempting to convey how insidious and damaging existing societal power structures can be. I wanted the writing to convey more self-reflection than it did.
What I *am* lowering my rating for, though, is how the book felt like it was meant to tell a deep story about the imperfections of a society while also (seemingly unconsciously?) assuming as right and natural some of the worse parts of our own society. For example, the female characters all felt pretty flat to me. I felt like I was watching cardboard cutouts that either existed to be put on a pedestal, or to be motherly, or to be shy and vulnerable, or to be tempting to Darrow. (Even a female character that is referred to as "the brightest" by Darrow himself mostly exists to bounce his own ideas off of; the actual ideas that turn the plot all come from him. Also there are plenty of jabs of "like a girl," etc. that I think we as readers are supposed to think are witty and clever.) I also found myself very uncomfortable at times with how rape felt like it was just sprinkled into the plot, and especially with the
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Violence, and Slavery
Moderate: Rape
Minor: Sexism