Red Rising

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.

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 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 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.