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.