My most disappointing read this year. On paper, Red Rising is a book I would love: it is often compared to one of my all-time fav series, the Hunger Games (a comparison that makes sense on some levels and baffles me on others), and the premise sounds great. Revolution to disrupt social hierarchy on a terraformed Mars? Sign me up! 

 

My hopes were dashed pretty much right away. The main character, Darrow, is insufferable from page 1 and only becomes more so as Pierce Brown bludgeons his readers with the “chosen one” trope. We’re repeatedly told Darrow is brilliant, yet he failed to see a plot twist I predicted 100 pages before it happened. All the characters read as flat, stereotypical, and underdeveloped. The writing style felt choppy with stilted, melodramatic dialogue. The most bizarre aspect to me was the pacing — this somehow felt both boring and too fast-paced. I really had to push through the second half of the book. 

 

The biggest issues for me were the world-building and misogyny. I had so many questions about the color caste system and how it came to replace the previous racial/imperial order of earth (we just get hand-wavy explanations of power-hungry Golds). By not addressing how our current social structures fell by the wayside, we’re left with a “post-racial” cast of characters that would all presumably be white if they were still on Earth — an implication that is concerning at best. If Pierce Brown was attempting to make some kind of social commentary other than “fascism is bad,” I’m not sure what it was supposed to be. 

 

The logic of the murder institute Darrow infiltrates also made no sense to me. Why would Golds, who have invested significant resources into “improving” their gene pool through eugenics, send their kids off to a place where they could be murdered just so they can get positions in the space bureaucracy? Why are castles and empty forests some of the first things that exist on a terraformed planet, and the sites of contrived trials? Why are there GOT-esque houses and sigils on top of the color caste system? 

 

Finally, the pervasive misogyny and homophobia in this book were painful to read. There are basically five types of women in this book and all of them are tropes: (1) the dead wife, (2) matronly salt-of-the-earth Red women, (3) badass Gold women who have no personality, (4) distant leaders with no personality, and (5) sex workers. The way all these women are described and treated is pretty horrible. While reading, I wrote down more than 20 genuinely cringe-inducing quotes and moments that don’t bear repeating. Pierce Brown has said in an interview that the Red society is supposed to be misogynistic, while the Gold society treats men and women equally. Setting up your lower caste as misogynistic and your upper caste as egalitarian is problematic to me from the jump, but I also don’t buy it. So much causal misogyny is hurled at the Gold women and rape is used as a plot device without any subversion. Apparently Darrow is forced to unlearn patriarchal behaviors later on in the series as character development — I hate that on a conceptual level and I won’t be sticking around to see whether it redeems him at all. 

 

Other miscellaneous things I didn’t like: 

 
I’ve heard the series gets better, but this one just isn’t for me. I wish I could un-read this book.