Red Rising by Pierce Brown Review

So this review is one I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I read Red Rising for the first time last summer. I picked it up from a secondhand store in Omaha a year or two ago after the series was recommended repeatedly in some of my favorite social media groups. And it seems like people either love these books or they really don’t like them at all. So I read them, and took some time thinking before just running my mouth. I hope it all comes out well. There will be some spoilers for the series, in case you worry about those. The Red Rising series is two trilogies with the last book due out soonish I believe. I tried to summarize the first trilogy in one post and it got...long. So here is the review for book one. The strengths and weaknesses of book one continue through the rest of the series that I have read. 

Red Rising is a Science Fiction with a lot of dystopian themes. In the future there are human habitations on all of the planets in our solar system with land. Terraforming and atmosphere construction have reached the point that the entire first story is on Mars with Earth-like flora, fauna, weather, etc including oceans and frozen poles. Billions of people live on Mars, but the Society is ruled from Luna (the moon) with Governors appointed by the ruler (dictator). We also through the series see people from Venus, Earth, and various Galilean moons. Also note, the Society is obsessed with all things Roman mythological and historical, from most names in the Golds, lots of place names and Gold ruling styles. In the Society people are defined by their Color, with Gold ruling and Red at the bottom doing menial jobs or basically slaves mining the special helium that powers the spaceships. The Color is in sigils on the hands, and also shades hair, skin and eye color in some way. It is of course hereditary and changing sigils is punishable by death (if the process itself doesn’t kill you). Of course there is a low-level rebellion going on among the Reds, but it never goes anywhere because they are so powerless. 

So to characters. Darrow is a Red, one of the leaders in the miners and a teenager. He is married to a teenage girl Io (and his uncle is ancient at 35 so there’s some thoughts on life expectancy here) who gets in trouble with him for being on the grass. She ends up getting killed in the first couple chapters which launches the whole story. The video of her death gets out and people in some places are upset of course but that’s it. Darrow though, tries to get himself killed in his grief. But of course he doesn’t die, they just make it look like it and he’s taken and changed from Red to Gold. It takes a year or more to recover from the surgeries and learn what he needs to fit in with Gold Society. 

Once he learns he gets into the Institute, a ‘school’ program that is significantly more Hunger Games than Hogwarts. This is the main focus of the book, and where the story takes off for real. Divided into houses based on Roman Gods, Darrow is in House Mars (god of war, if you need the refresher). The goal? Win by beating all the other Houses and capturing their scepter. Easy, except they all have castles to live in and are given increasingly more high tech weapons as the year goes on. Yes, it takes about a year to get through the Institue. We meet Cassius, Rocque, Sevro, and others in the House Mars. Then Tacitus, Mustang, Jackal, and many others as Darrow fights with and against the students. And this is not a clean fight. To get into the Institute you kill another student. And you keep fighting to win either by death or subjugation the entire year. It is brutal, there is (mostly offscreen thankfully) sex and rape and onscreen flogging, mutilation, murder, and vicious fighting. The descriptions were almost more than I could stand to read at some points and I skipped a bit. I don’t mind fighting, and even large body counts are usually fine for me as long as the description is vague enough that I can keep it PG-13 in my head. This was not easy to read; I almost put the book down a couple of times. Eventually of course Darrow and his buddies win the Institute and become Peerless Scarred. Yes, the mark of winning is to get a giant scar down the side of your face. Brown definitely ascribes more to the philosophy of life being “nasty, brutish, and short” in this series. But through it all Darrow becomes the infiltrator that the Reds need to lead the rebellion. So there’s that I guess?

The biggest strength of the book is the characters. No matter how many despicable things these people do, they feel real and compelling and I had to find out what happened to them. Their motivations were realistic and they were well rounded. The world they lived in felt really real as well, fully populated with problems that need solving. The biggest weakness is definitely the plot. It seems to jump from scene to scene with just a bare through line to drive it. Almost I would say it’s a series of vignettes or short stories put together into one book (though book one was better in general at full plot than books 2 and 3). All the boring/slow parts are just cut out and the action skips forward to the next plot point. 

In conclusion, I can definitely see why this series is either loved or hated. The character work and world building is amazing, but the plot is lacking and the violence is (for me) excessively gratuitous. If that’s something that doesn’t bother you I’d expect you’ll love the books. For me, it was just okay when everything is balanced out. I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads directly after I finished, and I stand by that. The overall rating is just over 4 stars though, so maybe you will like it more than I did. And if you do, let me know why and we can talk about it. Maybe you’ll change my mind.