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A review by rachel_sherck
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
I started typing this review with my thumbs, beginning to list my many, many thoughts from simplest to most complex. As it went on and I delved into the “most complex,” my thumbs really flew, my blood pressure rose, and I circled back to the beginning of this text box, scrolled up, and lowered my rating from 4.0 to 3.0. 🤷♀️
Did I like this book? In so many ways, yes. The premise, the style of prose, the fabulous narration (I read this one in audio), and the setting all drew me in from the first pages. Which was kind of the problem. More on that later. 😝
When I began reading, I had that fabulous sensation that I was embarking on an epic adventure I would never forget. The beginning of the book steeped me in the world, planted dozens of seeds of curiosity, and also made me fall slightly in love with the audiobook narrator. And then disappointment started setting in.
Pacing
The pacing in this book felt very strange to me. At the outset my impression was that this would be an immersive story told in a close point of view, but by the end of the book, despite the first person/present tense, there was nonetheless distance between myself and the action. With a few exceptions, mostly battle sequences, more than half of this book I experienced at a distance, observing a war games plot that interested me only marginally, deeply missing the feeling evoked by the early chapters.
I know what I’m describing is a pacing and style preference. I’ve not read many reviews of this book (yet) but I noticed a few preferred the pacing of the later part of the book above the “slow” beginning. But the inconsistency in pace is what throws me, as it set my expectations for a nuanced, emotional, character-driven book but ultimately delivered a broad-strokes sequence of events surrounding Darrow and his fellow students’ strategy games.
Stakes and tension
We all knew that the games were just games and wouldn’t matter after a winner was declared, so it was frustrating to spend the bulk of the book on events that didn’t prompt any noticeable evolution of the main character, Darrow, or deepen our understanding of Gold culture, the history of humanity in this world, or anything significant on a world building level. Save a few casual details about the way that the carvers had built hyped up versions of earth animals and stocked Mars with them, but this amounted to only a few lines. Still it was one of the few things I enjoyed about the majority of this book past the first act.
I clung to hope that if I could get through the long game of the “school,” the book would return to the themes that it introduced long enough to hook me in the beginning. But honestly, by the end I had lost hope of that and only kept reading because I knew this was the first book in a long, acclaimed series, and I’m willing to read at least one more to give the series a solid opportunity to redeem itself.
Misogyny
I left this critique for last, but in a way it was the aspect of the book that most negatively affected my experience. I heard another reviewer describe the misogyny in this narrative (which is objectively present, and readers who disagree need to really ruminate on their own concepts of gender and sexism) as feeling like a belief system from our world that leached into the world of the story. That is so well expressed and resonated with me immediately. Let me get into it…
I don’t mind misogyny existing in fiction. In fact, sometimes its total absence can test my suspension of disbelief to a point where I’m just as frustrated as if it had been present without basis, the way it is in this book. But when misogyny is present in a book written in this century, I expect it to be depicted thoughtfully and accurately, and consciously and deliberately challenged on the page. And if it’s present in a book written in this century and set several hundred years in the future, in a society that is sufficiently functional to have colonized and terraformed the entire solar system, then I expect it to make sense.
Misogyny cont’d (sexism)
In Red Rising, there are clear gender roles in the society of the Reds where Darrow grew up. Only men go into the mines. Women are revered by Darrow as being a source of beauty, gentleness, etc., that in some ways defies the dirty and brutal existence of his people. And he’s 16 when the book begins, so a kind of chivalrous version of misogyny works for his point of view. But he never evolves beyond this, expressing no surprise when he meets the rebels and one of them is a woman (who, like everyone else in this book, particularly the women, is described in a fashion that centers her attractiveness. She is beautiful on the unscarred half of her face. Even more beautiful, apparently, than the wife Darrow is still purportedly mourning). Readers are seemingly expected to interpret the world outside of the mines as more egalitarian among the sexes. Men can be “pinks,” the caste of people enslaved for the purpose of sexual gratification, and women can go to the war college that Darrow ultimately attends.
Yet many characters, not just Darrow, consistently center the concepts of leadership and honor around men. I could reread this book with a highlighter and capture every instance of this, or you could skim the book yourself and easily find examples. So which is it? Is the world gender egalitarian or strictly patriarchal? Or is it in some tense state of transition, like the world we live in? There isn’t enough nuance here to know. Which tells me that the author and editors weren’t giving it much thought. Which is disappointing and depressingly unsurprising.
Anyway, by the time the story events became overtly sexist misogynistic, I had more or less accepted that this book was going to miss an opportunity to say something interesting about gender, but I still became increasingly tempted to quit reading. Sexual violence against women, off page and serving only to create moral outrage in the main character or demonstrate the depravity of his foes, abounds in this book to an almost comical degree. (Almost, because it’s really gross, therefore hard to see the comedy.) Homophobic insults are also an offhand feature in the banter of the war games bros. Darrow at one point takes a slave from another castle because she says she can cook, and the sum total of later references to her surround her doing the cooking. There are women in positions of note and authority among Darrow’s classmates, but only because they lean into the hyper masculine culture of the war games established by majority-male leadership. And still they are described as “girls,” occasionally praised for being pretty or gentle, and are grouped together in the narrator’s internal thoughts when he makes decisions about who will fight and who will tend to other tasks.
Lack of 🌈
Aside from the aforementioned homophobic banter, there is no acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ persons, period. Much less actual representation. In a cast of future-humans so privileged by their wealth and caste they can do whatever they want, I find that as implausible as it is insensitive to the members of the reading community.
There is also a notable, strict gender binary, expressed by both Darrow and other characters. Honestly books that do the bare minimum—acknowledging that gender-queer persons exist—are so rare they thrill me. The ones that actually offer meaningful representation are incredibly hard to find. So, no surprise that this one fails in that respect but still, whenever a book uses “boys and girls” or “men and women” to refer to “all people,” the effect isn’t only lack of representation. It’s erasure.
tl;dr
Authors: if you’re going to build a vast, complex, technologically advanced future world where society is patriarchal, homophobic, and acknowledges only two genders, then you need to explain why it is the way it is, right there in the book.
If you do not, your silence on that topic will leave me with no choice but to assume you view those aspects of our present-day society as so inherent to human culture, so “natural,” that they are inevitable in any world, including the world you created.
So much of what draws me to speculative fiction is the opportunity to explore human potential, on an individual, political, and societal level. If you can’t offer me more than a transposition of my own, wearying reality, then you’ve missed an opportunity. And you’ve kind of pissed me off.
Did I like this book? In so many ways, yes. The premise, the style of prose, the fabulous narration (I read this one in audio), and the setting all drew me in from the first pages. Which was kind of the problem. More on that later. 😝
When I began reading, I had that fabulous sensation that I was embarking on an epic adventure I would never forget. The beginning of the book steeped me in the world, planted dozens of seeds of curiosity, and also made me fall slightly in love with the audiobook narrator. And then disappointment started setting in.
Pacing
The pacing in this book felt very strange to me. At the outset my impression was that this would be an immersive story told in a close point of view, but by the end of the book, despite the first person/present tense, there was nonetheless distance between myself and the action. With a few exceptions, mostly battle sequences, more than half of this book I experienced at a distance, observing a war games plot that interested me only marginally, deeply missing the feeling evoked by the early chapters.
I know what I’m describing is a pacing and style preference. I’ve not read many reviews of this book (yet) but I noticed a few preferred the pacing of the later part of the book above the “slow” beginning. But the inconsistency in pace is what throws me, as it set my expectations for a nuanced, emotional, character-driven book but ultimately delivered a broad-strokes sequence of events surrounding Darrow and his fellow students’ strategy games.
Stakes and tension
We all knew that the games were just games and wouldn’t matter after a winner was declared, so it was frustrating to spend the bulk of the book on events that didn’t prompt any noticeable evolution of the main character, Darrow, or deepen our understanding of Gold culture, the history of humanity in this world, or anything significant on a world building level. Save a few casual details about the way that the carvers had built hyped up versions of earth animals and stocked Mars with them, but this amounted to only a few lines. Still it was one of the few things I enjoyed about the majority of this book past the first act.
I clung to hope that if I could get through the long game of the “school,” the book would return to the themes that it introduced long enough to hook me in the beginning. But honestly, by the end I had lost hope of that and only kept reading because I knew this was the first book in a long, acclaimed series, and I’m willing to read at least one more to give the series a solid opportunity to redeem itself.
Misogyny
I left this critique for last, but in a way it was the aspect of the book that most negatively affected my experience. I heard another reviewer describe the misogyny in this narrative (which is objectively present, and readers who disagree need to really ruminate on their own concepts of gender and sexism) as feeling like a belief system from our world that leached into the world of the story. That is so well expressed and resonated with me immediately. Let me get into it…
I don’t mind misogyny existing in fiction. In fact, sometimes its total absence can test my suspension of disbelief to a point where I’m just as frustrated as if it had been present without basis, the way it is in this book. But when misogyny is present in a book written in this century, I expect it to be depicted thoughtfully and accurately, and consciously and deliberately challenged on the page. And if it’s present in a book written in this century and set several hundred years in the future, in a society that is sufficiently functional to have colonized and terraformed the entire solar system, then I expect it to make sense.
Misogyny cont’d (sexism)
In Red Rising, there are clear gender roles in the society of the Reds where Darrow grew up. Only men go into the mines. Women are revered by Darrow as being a source of beauty, gentleness, etc., that in some ways defies the dirty and brutal existence of his people. And he’s 16 when the book begins, so a kind of chivalrous version of misogyny works for his point of view. But he never evolves beyond this, expressing no surprise when he meets the rebels and one of them is a woman (who, like everyone else in this book, particularly the women, is described in a fashion that centers her attractiveness. She is beautiful on the unscarred half of her face. Even more beautiful, apparently, than the wife Darrow is still purportedly mourning). Readers are seemingly expected to interpret the world outside of the mines as more egalitarian among the sexes. Men can be “pinks,” the caste of people enslaved for the purpose of sexual gratification, and women can go to the war college that Darrow ultimately attends.
Yet many characters, not just Darrow, consistently center the concepts of leadership and honor around men. I could reread this book with a highlighter and capture every instance of this, or you could skim the book yourself and easily find examples. So which is it? Is the world gender egalitarian or strictly patriarchal? Or is it in some tense state of transition, like the world we live in? There isn’t enough nuance here to know. Which tells me that the author and editors weren’t giving it much thought. Which is disappointing and depressingly unsurprising.
Anyway, by the time the story events became overtly sexist misogynistic, I had more or less accepted that this book was going to miss an opportunity to say something interesting about gender, but I still became increasingly tempted to quit reading. Sexual violence against women, off page and serving only to create moral outrage in the main character or demonstrate the depravity of his foes, abounds in this book to an almost comical degree. (Almost, because it’s really gross, therefore hard to see the comedy.) Homophobic insults are also an offhand feature in the banter of the war games bros. Darrow at one point takes a slave from another castle because she says she can cook, and the sum total of later references to her surround her doing the cooking. There are women in positions of note and authority among Darrow’s classmates, but only because they lean into the hyper masculine culture of the war games established by majority-male leadership. And still they are described as “girls,” occasionally praised for being pretty or gentle, and are grouped together in the narrator’s internal thoughts when he makes decisions about who will fight and who will tend to other tasks.
Lack of 🌈
Aside from the aforementioned homophobic banter, there is no acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ persons, period. Much less actual representation. In a cast of future-humans so privileged by their wealth and caste they can do whatever they want, I find that as implausible as it is insensitive to the members of the reading community.
There is also a notable, strict gender binary, expressed by both Darrow and other characters. Honestly books that do the bare minimum—acknowledging that gender-queer persons exist—are so rare they thrill me. The ones that actually offer meaningful representation are incredibly hard to find. So, no surprise that this one fails in that respect but still, whenever a book uses “boys and girls” or “men and women” to refer to “all people,” the effect isn’t only lack of representation. It’s erasure.
tl;dr
Authors: if you’re going to build a vast, complex, technologically advanced future world where society is patriarchal, homophobic, and acknowledges only two genders, then you need to explain why it is the way it is, right there in the book.
If you do not, your silence on that topic will leave me with no choice but to assume you view those aspects of our present-day society as so inherent to human culture, so “natural,” that they are inevitable in any world, including the world you created.
So much of what draws me to speculative fiction is the opportunity to explore human potential, on an individual, political, and societal level. If you can’t offer me more than a transposition of my own, wearying reality, then you’ve missed an opportunity. And you’ve kind of pissed me off.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, War, and Violence
Moderate: Rape, Sexual assault, and Homophobia