# of Pages: 382
Time it took me to read: 7 days
# of pages a day to finish in a week: 54
Rating: 3 out of 5
Darrow has the life he has always imagined for himself. He’s a Helldiver, the most dangerous job in the underground mines of Mars where his caste, the Reds, live. But the job comes with prestige and respect, and he’s married to the girl of his dreams, Eo, and lives surrounded by his family. But Eo has always dreamed of there being more in life than working the mines, watching their families, their people, die so very young due to the hard, dangerous nature of their work.
When Darrow and Eo get caught somewhere they shouldn’t be, Darrow never dreams that it will change his life forever. Because just as he thinks all is lost, someone finds him. A rebel sect that tells him everything he’s ever been told about his life and his purpose is a lie. Suddenly he is given an opportunity: make Eo’s dream a reality, and infiltrate the highest caste of their Society: the Golds, who are the perfect embodiment of human creation down to their very DNA. But if Darrow wants a chance at revenge and lifting his people from the underground mines of Mars, he must become a Gold both physically and mentally. Because then, they’ll never see him coming until it’s too late.
Review (Spoiler Free!):
Okay, I’ll say it. I really didn’t want to like this book. In fact, I was convinced I hated it until about half way through. But it’s a book for my book club so I had to finish it and now here we are. I gave this book a 3 out of 5, but really it was probably closer to a 3.5 or a 4, but since I don’t give half stars and I simply could not bring myself to give it a 4, I had to settle at 3.
I’ll start by telling you that this really isn’t my genre. Even though the protagonist, Darrow, is between 16 and 18 through the story, this is not YA. It was in the adult Sci-Fi section of the bookstore, and is certainly written in the adult style, not the YA style. And it’s Sci-Fi, of which I read very little, so I didn’t think I would like it in the first place. But I’m trying to diversify, and my book club voted on this book fair and square.
Let’s begin with pacing. This was one of the slower paced books I’ve ever read. 382 pages dragged, I had to read the book around 50 pages at a time all the way until the last hundred or so when I was finally able to push hard through it. The first 50 pages in particular does that thing, you know, that a lot of Sci-Fi (and some hard fantasy) books do where they spend the first 50-100 pages completely info-dumping you into the world. The second 50 pages is a bit better, but still a tough read. If I could rate the first 100 pages separately from the rest of the book, I’d give them a 1 out of 5 and the rest of the book a 4. I’m pretty convinced that this book is objectively slow-paced, but I’ll admit that my opinion that it was a complete sludge to get through is probably subjective. If you’re into this genre, it probably isn’t so bad.
So here I am, 100 pages in, and I’m convinced I’m going to hate this book from start to finish. Because up until now all that has happened is the catalyst to the rest of the story buried in very in-depth Sci-Fi explanations and lingo. But then, all of the sudden, this book stops reading like a Sci-Fi I can’t wrap my head around and starts reading like dystopia. It gets VERY Hunger Games-esque, very fast. And all of the sudden, pretty much against my will, I find myself on board. I would have bet money at 100 pages in that never in a million years would the plot hook me by the end, but I would have lost that money. Because not only did the plot hook me, but by the end of the book I found myself completely immersed in the story, staying up too late on a work night to finish it, almost like I’d do with a book I actually enjoyed. Go figure.
However, as much as I did end up enjoying the plot by the end, there were a few parts of this book that I have to rant about because I did not like at all. First off, the style. Ugh, the first 50-100 pages the writing was so stylized that I felt like I was rolling my eyes and gagging through most of it. Not only was the sci-fi lingo almost unintelligible from the very first page, but the way the dialogue was written was so incredibly strange, almost like someone put English through Google Translate into a completely different language, and then had Google Translate it back to English. But the even weirder part…like half way through the book they just…stop talking weird. Like, any kind of “dialect” that the author created just kind of…went away. Except for a few random moments that felt purposeful, the rest of the dialogue was normal. Super duper strange. Like, I feel like if you’re going to commit to the unique dialect, you have to go all in, or not do it at all. This half-and-half thing seemed wishy-washy.
Also, and this is definitely a personal opinion that I get is pretty snobby, but the author kind of tried to pull some Greco-Roman (mostly Roman) themes in there with each of the Gold houses being like “House Venus” and “House Jupiter”. But it kinda just felt like the author cracked open one book about the Roman gods, skimmed it, and then decided to try and make it a whole thing. I think he should have either made something up entirely his own, or just gone real big with it. But again…kinda wishy-washy.
And finally, probably one of my biggest pet peeves (particularly since I ended up being hooked by the plot in the end), is that I do not like Darrow. I think he is a boring, pretentious character who doesn’t go through any earned or engaging arc. I was far more engaged by some of the side characters, though many of them annoyed me too. Besides like one female character, I felt like all the female side characters were plot devices, which is honestly pretty typical of many male sci-fi and fantasy writers that I’ve read (at least in adult). I found Eo, Darrow’s young wife, way more interesting and wish she would have been more involved in the overall story. But like I said…plot device. I’m particularly peeved because it sucks for me as a reader to be engaged enough in the story that I’m going to pick up the sequel, because while I am rooting for Darrow’s cause and am engaged by the events that surround him, I am not rooting for Darrow and honestly, truly, would not care if he died in the end. It’s always mildly unpleasant/uncomfortable for me to read a book where I care about the plot but not the characters.
Regardless, I’ll pick up the sequel at some point (it’s a completed trilogy), and I’ll see if I enjoy the second book enough to finish the whole series.
I’d say, if you’re a fan of adult Sci-Fi or even a fan of Hunger Games style “fight to the death game” type stories, you could give this one a try. I think a lot of what I didn’t like about this book was subjective, I don’t think that Pierce Brown is a bad writer or anything, I just wouldn’t call myself a fan and probably wouldn’t have finished this book had it not been for my book club.
If you liked Red Rising, try:
Zenith by Sasha Alsberg & Lindsay Cummings
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Diabolic by SJ Kincaid
Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth
Sarah's Shelf 