Darrow is a Red, a miner in the interior of Mars. His mission is to extract enough precious elements to one day tame the surface of the planet and allow humans to live on it.
The Reds are humanity's last hope.
Or so it appears, until the day Darrow discovers it's all a lie.
That Mars has been habitable - and inhabited - for generations, by a class of people calling themselves the Golds.
A class of people who look down on Darrow and his fellows as slave labour, to be exploited and worked to death without a second thought. Until the day that Darrow, with the help of a mysterious group of rebels, disguises himself as a Gold and infiltrates their command school, intent on taking down his oppressors from the inside.
But the command school is a battlefield - and Darrow isn't the only …
The Earth is dying.
Darrow is a Red, a miner in the interior of Mars. His mission is to extract enough precious elements to one day tame the surface of the planet and allow humans to live on it.
The Reds are humanity's last hope.
Or so it appears, until the day Darrow discovers it's all a lie.
That Mars has been habitable - and inhabited - for generations, by a class of people calling themselves the Golds.
A class of people who look down on Darrow and his fellows as slave labour, to be exploited and worked to death without a second thought. Until the day that Darrow, with the help of a mysterious group of rebels, disguises himself as a Gold and infiltrates their command school, intent on taking down his oppressors from the inside.
But the command school is a battlefield - and Darrow isn't the only student with an agenda.
Familiar-feeling distopia in which people are acknowledged for their differing talents and abilities but our hero just doesn't fit the neat boxes. And because the system doesn't work for one person, it MUST BE DESTROYED.
There's a little glimpse now and then in which our hero sees that yeah, the Golds are actually pretty excpetional. Not morally superior, sure. But better at everything else.
The love interest is pretty good. And I really enjoyed the line Who does he think he is? Ceasar? Patton? Wiggin? That was pretty great.
"This is the problem with youth, Darrow. You forget that every generation has thought the same."
"But for my generation it is true." No matter his confidence, I am right.
I knew nothing of the series before starting and was entertained all the way through. I would have liked to spend more time with Darrow in the mines but once Eo shared "her surprise" with Darrow the story went in a different direction entirely and I was fine with it.
As the story progressed I couldn't help shake some similarities with other books but I'll cover that below.
A fair bit of the book was devoted to the Institute. The game consumed the lives of those playing while there was a whole civilization, above and below ground, that was existing and struggling. I wanted to know more about Mars and see what was happening behind the scenes but the story …
"This is the problem with youth, Darrow. You forget that every generation has thought the same."
"But for my generation it is true." No matter his confidence, I am right.
I knew nothing of the series before starting and was entertained all the way through. I would have liked to spend more time with Darrow in the mines but once Eo shared "her surprise" with Darrow the story went in a different direction entirely and I was fine with it.
As the story progressed I couldn't help shake some similarities with other books but I'll cover that below.
A fair bit of the book was devoted to the Institute. The game consumed the lives of those playing while there was a whole civilization, above and below ground, that was existing and struggling. I wanted to know more about Mars and see what was happening behind the scenes but the story was focused on the game. In this way the reader and students are going through a similar experience. We are consumed by a single event but life continues on and nothing is put on pause while the game occurs.
The battle and war tactics were fun to read about but it would have been interesting to see more Mars specific attributes come in to play, outside of the difference in gravity.
I did not love him till he was dead; and he should be dead, but he is still my brother.
It's not hard to draw a parallel to The Hunger Games, but I found that it was more similar to Enders Game meets Lord of The Flies. The kids play their games, not knowing what they are doing or why and the adults observe in the background and give the students a pat on the head when it's all over.
Similarity aside, this book got my attention from chapter one and was a fun read so I will definitely be continuing on with the series.
The audience for this is clearly intended to be "People who liked The Hunger Games." Except for straight white men.
Our hero, Darrow, lives in a stratified, classical Greece inspired society, which is almost hilariously evil. Like, his caste, the Reds, live underground, starved, labouring in a fatally dangerous job, lied to that they are working for the day when Mars is inhabitable. What they don't know is that Mars is already inhabitiable, it's just that their labour is still useful. Also, they labour all month to win a competition that will give them extra food, but when they win, the prize goes to the other team because their overlords, the Golds, are Just That Evil. Anyway, his wife is murdered by the Golds, and Darrow is recruited into the resistance, where he is given a plastic surgery makeover to look like a Gold, and he becomes Revenge Batman to …
The audience for this is clearly intended to be "People who liked The Hunger Games." Except for straight white men.
Our hero, Darrow, lives in a stratified, classical Greece inspired society, which is almost hilariously evil. Like, his caste, the Reds, live underground, starved, labouring in a fatally dangerous job, lied to that they are working for the day when Mars is inhabitable. What they don't know is that Mars is already inhabitiable, it's just that their labour is still useful. Also, they labour all month to win a competition that will give them extra food, but when they win, the prize goes to the other team because their overlords, the Golds, are Just That Evil. Anyway, his wife is murdered by the Golds, and Darrow is recruited into the resistance, where he is given a plastic surgery makeover to look like a Gold, and he becomes Revenge Batman to infiltrate the Golds and bring about their downfall.
So, Undercover!Darrow has to go to school for Young Golds, so that he can get into their society, and it turns out that the school for Golds is also murderous. It starts with mandatory murder, and then it gets brutal. They are divided into camps (Darrow's is called 'Mars', because classical Greek) and told that whoever rises to the top of their camp, and whoever's camp wins the war, will gain top opportunities when jobs are handed out. This is where it gets very Hunger Games + rape. The war is supposed to be non-fatal, but eh. Sometimes accidents happen. Like sometimes you accidentally get stabbed in gut a couple dozen times.
It is interesting to see the forces that shape Gold society: obviously if your leaders are drawn from a pool of traumatised children, forced to kill or be killed at a young age, that's going to shape your society in some (terrible) ways. Some of the murder-y teens Darrow allies himself with in the battle are interesting characters; some of them rapists.
But honestly the book's greatest handicap is Darrow. He's not very interesting. His likes are: his dead wife, revenge, and ... I can't think of a third thing. He's freakishly talented at everything, except he's only sorta talented at the pschology of groups. His dislikes are: Golds. Who tweeted that Batman has the personality of "very grim oatmeal"? Because that is Darrow.
Anyhoodle. I managed to finish this book, half out of spite, but it is not technically incompetant.
Das Buch hat mir überhaupt nicht gefallen. Ich habe in vielen Rezensionen gelesen, dass der Schreibstil außergewöhnlich sein sollte, ich empfand das genauso, nur eben als unterirdisch schlecht.
Die ganze Handlung hat in meinen Augen überhaupt keinen Sinn ergeben und Darrow als Protagonist war zudem komplett nicht mein Fall. Das Science Fiction Setting hätte genial sein können, wurde aber zu wenig erklärt und haperte dann in der Ausführung, die wie eine schlechte Mischung aus Die Tribute von Panem und Game of Thrones anmutete.
Ich bin froh, das eBook für 99 Cent gekauft zu haben, ansonsten wäre es echt schade ums Geld gewesen.
This started off really annoying. It was slow, it was predictable. Had it not been recommended by two friends, I'd have put it down and never picked up again. Luckily I kept going on, it really got better page after page once Darrow was kicked into the game/school/whatever the hell that was. While reading the last 200 or so pages, I literally couldn't put it down. I'm not sure why there are no women except for LoveInterestGirl and RandomBystanderGirlWhoCouldBeAGuyAsWell in the game, but I'll take a guess at "because that's how it always has been".
I think the book was better than I give it credit for, but I went in having accidentally hyped myself up and not having read any specifics about it. I found the premise of the book rather cheesy and from there nothing the book did could save it for me. What is it with no-class-mobility dystopias and colour coding the classes to emphasise it? In what human world could that happen?
A fun sci-fi novel that follows the YA Dystopian bandwagon. It follows the quest of a young miner who must break from his social caste to infiltrate the tyranny that keeps his people enslaved. It reads fast and I enjoyed it. Not the best writing but good for YA. The worst issue was pacing but a great debut.
Interesting premise, but it may crib too much from existing works, since very little is surprising beyond the setup. Unlike Hunger Games or Ender's Game there are pretty much no likeable characters. It is all mere savagery, and the mournful obsessions that teenage me would have eaten up. That said, it is still a fairly entertaining read.
I didn't like the Hunger Games, so when I started calling this book "The Hunger Games on Mars", it was not meant to be flattering. But even though the second half is way more hungery-game-y than the first half, I still stopped calling it that a little over halfway through. This book is good in a way hunger games never was. Gritty and somehow more real, even though the universe is just as illogical and unlikely. The characters are more flushed out, less caricature, and everything is just (obviously in my opinion) way better written.
Don't get me wrong, it still had its flaws, but I did quite enjoy this, and will read the rest of them.
Red Rising is the first part of what seems to be a fun, fast paced trilogy which genuinely surprises you with plot twists and that flows along like the Hunger Games once did when I read it for the first time. There's not much about the plot you can say without spoiling the story and that's more than half the fun in this book, so I will just say I think the world building is detailed enough to feel immersive but not so much you get bored. I recommend it if you enjoy adult fiction with some serious political questions motivating the story. Not a lot of depth to the character building though, once you get the archetypes figured out you can sort of identify everyone's role in the story.. but it still manages to be exciting fun and, oddly enough, surprising at some points. Great summer reading, for fun …
Red Rising is the first part of what seems to be a fun, fast paced trilogy which genuinely surprises you with plot twists and that flows along like the Hunger Games once did when I read it for the first time. There's not much about the plot you can say without spoiling the story and that's more than half the fun in this book, so I will just say I think the world building is detailed enough to feel immersive but not so much you get bored. I recommend it if you enjoy adult fiction with some serious political questions motivating the story. Not a lot of depth to the character building though, once you get the archetypes figured out you can sort of identify everyone's role in the story.. but it still manages to be exciting fun and, oddly enough, surprising at some points. Great summer reading, for fun and revolution!
Going from heavy lifting reading of dark places to young adult reading of dark places is a bit distorting. It's like going from hiking mountains to a jaunt in some hilly woods. Takes a bit to get used to. ;)
Ah, the story of someone who is wronged, a caste system that is broken, and the ever present martyrs that catalyze a change. I thought I was entering a familiar trope--wouldn't you?
We go from that to a bodies transmogrification to something more familiar to Hunger Games, maybe in that it's just a wooded game--which is, of course, rigged, which of course, the protagonist wants to break the living crap out of.
Go get'm tiger..er Reaper!
It read fast, very fast, very easy, and I barked a few laughs here and there. When things go well though there is a palatable pitfall you can taste coming, and they do. Time …
Going from heavy lifting reading of dark places to young adult reading of dark places is a bit distorting. It's like going from hiking mountains to a jaunt in some hilly woods. Takes a bit to get used to. ;)
Ah, the story of someone who is wronged, a caste system that is broken, and the ever present martyrs that catalyze a change. I thought I was entering a familiar trope--wouldn't you?
We go from that to a bodies transmogrification to something more familiar to Hunger Games, maybe in that it's just a wooded game--which is, of course, rigged, which of course, the protagonist wants to break the living crap out of.
Go get'm tiger..er Reaper!
It read fast, very fast, very easy, and I barked a few laughs here and there. When things go well though there is a palatable pitfall you can taste coming, and they do. Time jumps and my brain sees montages, ponders what this would look like on a big screen--it'd probably work.
Being a series and a common threaded story you know, well you think you know, how this will end--and it does hit within the parameters, with a bit of a twist. I'm now sold on Darrow and want to see how he navigates the pitvipers of the Gold hierarchy. We want him to win but also we're not sure how he's going to handle the shovels of lies in relationships he's building. It's got that reality-tv hook in me, so onward we journey. :D To space and BEYOND!
TL;DR if you liked the Hunger Games, Ender's Game or similar dystopian Panem et Circenses style books you'll enjoy this first volume of the trilogy. Promised. Also lots of cool technology and interesting society, so if strange new worlds is your thing: read this.
But at its base, it is yet another iteration of the Hunger Games / Ender's Game variant of young adult stories. It starts out in a dreary, sweaty way that nearly made me put down the book. For some reason, I don't like beginnings where everything is already in the dregs. I like beginnings shiny before things take a turn for the worse.
The protagonist Darrow starts out as a Red. And in this world some 7 or 8 centuries in our future humanity has remade itself into color-coded castes using brutal eugenics, and the Reds are at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are the …
TL;DR if you liked the Hunger Games, Ender's Game or similar dystopian Panem et Circenses style books you'll enjoy this first volume of the trilogy. Promised. Also lots of cool technology and interesting society, so if strange new worlds is your thing: read this.
But at its base, it is yet another iteration of the Hunger Games / Ender's Game variant of young adult stories. It starts out in a dreary, sweaty way that nearly made me put down the book. For some reason, I don't like beginnings where everything is already in the dregs. I like beginnings shiny before things take a turn for the worse.
The protagonist Darrow starts out as a Red. And in this world some 7 or 8 centuries in our future humanity has remade itself into color-coded castes using brutal eugenics, and the Reds are at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are the slaves toiling away under the surface of Mars. They are told by their Golden rulers that they are brave pioneers making Mars ready for terraforming. Of course, as in every dystopian world, we know they are being lied to ... and from the beginning it is clear (look at the title) that some Reds are going to start a revolution.
The story takes a while to get there, taking time to show the arbitrariness and despotism of the rulers, and how the meritocracy is rigged to keep everyone down. There was nothing surprising to me in that, just same old dystopian tropes.
But then Darrow leaves the mines and discovers a whole new, and very different world, and so does the reader. From that moment on, I was captivated by the setting mostly. The plot soon gets on the "games that teach the young ones how brutal life is" rail-road. The take is somewhat new and I like the ploy of making the game's controllers into similes of Roman Gods complete with decadence, wine and all the trappings.
I deducted a star, because much of the story is same-old stuff I know from other similar books but it is so well done, that I had a lot of fun - after getting out of the mines.
One thing that I am still missing are characters to identify with. Mustang is interesting and Jackal of course, not to forget Sevro. I had hoped to get more milage out of the whole Cassius/Julian issue. But too many people die and I find Darrow is not my kind of guy. He is lacking something beyond competence to make him likeable. He is extremely competent and driven but that's about it.
