Bookworm Speaks!- Red Rising

Bookworm Speaks!

Red Rising

by Pierce Brown

****

Acquired: Half-Price Books

Series: Red Rising Saga (Book 1)

Publisher: Del Rey; Reprint edition (2014)

Papberback: 416 pages

Language: English

****

The Story: Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power.  He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies . . . even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

The Review: Dystopic fiction is a dime a dozen these days and with so many authors and publishers attempting to cash in on the success of “The Hunger Games” or “Divergent” the end result is that it takes a great deal of effort to stand out and even then it can be easy to dismiss it as ‘another teen rebellion’ book.

Red Rising breaks the mold in an incredibly distinctive way. It takes some tried and true tropes of the genre but then proceeds to hammer them into its own distinct creation. 

The best part of this whole is the world-building. The atmosphere is visceral and tangible. Every page where setting is described creates beautiful word paintings. 

The protagonist Darrow, also helps this book rise above its fellows. Darrow is very unique as a character in spite of retreading many familiar concepts i.e. teenage member of the downtrodden masses who is elevated to a position to affect change. At first glance, he does seem like something of a blank slate, however it is more accurate to describe as an uncomplicated character. Not simple. Uncomplicated. Which slowly falls away as the story unfolds and Darrow is forced to actually utilize his wits in order to survive. As hard as his life might have been in the tunnels, it did not require a lot of thinking. This growth as a character is one of the main selling points of the novel. Darrow was not born into a position of leadership, nor does he desire one but he slowly starts to learn the ways of the Golds and discovers that he may in fact have a natural talent for it. It frightens him. Power tends to do that. People are willing to kill for him. 

It could be said that this book is what the Hunger Games should have been. The scenario Darrow finds himself in is not dissimilar from the Hunger Games yet is a much more grounded situation in how bloodthirsty it all is. These teenaged warriors kill, rape, torture, bleed, fall ill and all sorts of stomach churning shenanigans. Its never gets too graphic but it is clear that humans can become very brutal when faced with death. 

Its worthy of note that while there is a romance in this book, no surprises there, it is a handled in a refreshingly different way. Darrow does not have a sweetheart in the beginning, he has a wife! At first glance this may seem unusual to modern day readers, but is stated that Red’s did not live very long, thirty being considered old, which typical of forced laborers throughout history. 

The writing style is very unique. Atmospheric yet very direct. Very lean. Rich but easy to swallow. If Bookworm were to point out a flaw with it, it’s that sometimes the author forgot that he was writing a science fiction book and leaned a little too far into fantasy. The story treads some familiar ground over the course of the test and games. 

If one was to judge Bookworm’s favorite franchise based solely on the number of books in his library, it would Warhammer 40k. There are multiple reasons why this is so but one of the main reasons is that it is a grand epic that reads almost like mythology as much as science fiction.  

That is Bookworm’s favorite kind of fiction. It applies to other mediums such as the Dune novels, the Homeworld video game series, and this book.

This is clearly a science fiction sotry, with cyborgs, spaceships, and even a version of a jetpack, but there remains a very real sense of the mythic. This is why Bookworm’s answer to Great Nerd Debate is Star Wars over Star Trek. In Star Trek it’s all science. In Star Wars, there is still room for magic. While there may not be any version of The Force in Red Rising (so far at least), the story still reads like an ancient legend one would find carved in the wall of a deep catacomb or an illuminated manuscript in some dusty corner of the library. 

Final Verdict: At times, Bookworm though this book deserved a three but upon further review, he realizes that this book is greater than the sum of its parts. An epic adventure, based on science fiction but grounded in mythology. At the bookstore as well as Bookworm’s Library Red Rising has a place in science fiction, not Young Adult. 

Bookworm can’t wait to read the sequel!

Four Gladius out of Five

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