Review: Red Rising Trilogy
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About what would happen next (I was usually wrong).
About who would live to fight another day.
About whether I’d survive the next round of heart palpitations to finish the story.
These books ripped my heart to shreds and stomped all over the pieces a few times. But as a trilogy, they soared with intricate plots, flat-out amazing world building — that expanded with each book, and a hellaciously satisfying ending. The characters were diverse and often offbeat, with fascinating histories and a continuously evolving social dynamic that drove many plots.
This is rollicking sci-fi epic at its best, augmented with the excellent social and political commentary and philosophical introspection I expect in dystopian drama. If that whets your appetite for literary adventure, I hope you’ll let me tell you more about each book below. Minimal spoilers, of course!
The Red Rising trilogy gets better with each book, and far surpasses the sum of its parts. Its rapid twists and turns never failed to surprise and occasionally render me speechless.
Red Rising
This book introduces Darrow, the 16-year-old hero of the series. He lives in an underground mining community on Mars and drives the massive Helldiver extraction machinery to mine a resource that will be used to terraform the planet above them for future colonization. No one he knows will ever visit the surface or see the sun.Darrow and his family belong to a genetically-engineered, color-based caste system that determines what their job is, where they live, and what if any privileges and niceties they’re allowed. He is a low-color Red, which is a drudge laborer who sacrifices his entire life to bring about a far-distant better future for someone else.
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| The Color Castes (Source) |
In theory. Because he finds out that a thriving population of the ruling Gold caste and its attendant rainbow of servant colors have been living on the fully terraformed surface of Mars for hundreds of years. And then he gets mad.
In the beginning, Darrow is happily married and perfectly content with his life. Then his wife is executed and becomes a symbol of resistance. She martyrs herself in hopes of inspiring her husband and others to share her vision of a world in which everyone is free.
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“Break the chains, my love.”After her death, Darrow doesn’t volunteer to don the superhero cape, so to speak. But a resistance group called the Sons of Ares sees something special in him, and when opportunity presents itself, they resurrect and surgically remake him into a Gold warrior. They show him the truth, hone his body into a weapon, then set him on a mission to infiltrate Gold Society and destroy it from within.
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I’m not gonna lie, this book lags a bit as it sets everything up. There is a lot of world (actually, a solar system) to build for this series, and Red Rising is where the info dump builds most of it. But the world turns out to be extraordinarily complex and intriguing, so I kept reading. I thought it was like Lord of the Flies on Mars for a while, very Hunger Games-y. But don’t let that discourage you. The series evolves far beyond what it appears to be.
The fact that Darrow is young and has a maturation curve is where this series stops being YA, IMHO. It’s adult sci-fi, full of violence, cruelty, and social, political, and economic intrigue, though the info-dump world-building really made me want to classify it as fantasy.
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| Darrow at start and end of book (Source: @merwild) |
Darrow is a brilliant strategist with a clever mind that reliably invents unexpected, pioneering, often batshit crazy solutions to any problem. The Sons of Ares smuggle him into The Institute, on Mars’ surface, to compete against other Golds his age in a rite of passage that determines their future positions in the Society — whether they become the “Peerless scarred” military commanders, political leaders, and titans of industry or insignificant “also rans” and fringe hangers on.
The measure of a man is what he does when he has power.This is the Hunger Games-y part. Brutal, brutal, brutal. But it’s also where you’ll meet a fascinating ensemble cast of characters who lose their innocence and grow up together, then find their paths continuing to cross as the ties that bind prove strong and lasting. Darrow has a natural talent for leadership, and he attracts a wildly eclectic, exuberant, and perhaps eccentric assortment of loyal followers who call him The Reaper, for his ruthlessness and the weapon he wields.
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| The Howlers might be the most eccentric (Source) |
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Yet Darrow hides a dangerous secret about his purpose and origins. It makes for interesting dynamics. It also makes it harder to get to know some of the characters for a while, but then I thoroughly enjoyed watching (most of) them grow into their own. And there are a few villains I think you’ll really really really love to hate along with me.
We are not our station in life. We are us — the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.
Golden Son
Here’s where the series switches gears from Hunger Games to Star Trek space opera. This book starts with a bang, then takes off in a completely different direction than you were tricked into expecting and never looks back.I lost track of the abrupt changes in direction, and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your very own case of whiplash, so I’ll avoid details about the plot. The action rarely lags, and it ends with a massive cliffhanger that kicks you in the gut. You’ll want to HAVE BOOK 3 STANDING BY. I cannot emphasize this enough.
The plot extends from Mars to Earth’s moon, Luna, which serves as the government seat for Gold Society, and the larger game of the Sons of Ares. Not everyone is on the same page about the goals of the resistance. Some want to simply drive out the corrupt political leaders, and others want to bring down the entire color-coded hierarchy across the solar system. But the Gold Society has massive armed fleets and weapons and allies and treasuries at its disposal, and its leaders will stop at nothing to maintain the status quo with deception, coercion, and brute force.
That’s what Society does — spread the blame so there is no villain, so it’s futile to even begin to find a villain, to find justice. It’s just machinery. Processes.Darrow struggles to focus on his higher values (transforming the social order, liberating the oppressed) and ignore his baser instincts (exacting revenge, becoming a tyrant). Some people can’t forgive him for lying about his origins back in Red Rising. Some are suspicious of his true motives even now. But most see him as either their worst nightmare or the savior that was promised. Though he longs for the tranquility of home and family, his destiny is destruction and upheaval on a massive scale.
In another life, you would have been one of my sons, Darrow. I would have found you earlier, before whatever happened that filled you with this rage. I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love.New characters appear, old favorites reveal interesting new depths, and some females finally get to shine from center stage. Like this one, who has a much bigger, badassier role in the last two books.
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| Source: @NanFe1789 |
“Consider that I was vulnerable. Lonely. And that perhaps I fell into Cassius’s bed because I was hurt and needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer.”I loved Golden Son from the very first chapter, and I put it down — with great difficulty — only to catch my breath and refill my drink in the brief transitions from one amazing climax to the next. The pace was relentless. My family missed me. But my pets loved the lap time, until I got to the last page and morphed into a raving madwoman frantically searching for book 3!!
I squirm on my cushion. “I suppose.”
“Good. Now shove that idea up your ass.” Her lips make a hard line. “I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool.”
We are not our station in life. We are us — the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.
Morning Star
This book starts with your utter astonishment at the ending of the previous book. Without giving you a single moment to catch your breath, the scope of Darrow’s battle to overthrow the Gold Society expands again to include the outer regions of the solar system: the Moon Lords of the gas giants and settlements on the outer planets.
Once again, there are many twists and turns that I rarely saw coming, non-stop action, and a really big surprise that I’ll remember as one of my favorite April Fool’s pranks ever. It was the only prank I fell for on April 1, 2019, but I fell for it HARD!
This book absolutely exhausted me emotionally — in a wonderful way. I’m pretty sure it gave me a couple of heart attacks, too. Seriously. It is intense and it will knock the floor out from under you.
“I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves.”
In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility.I LOVED the growth in ALL the main characters. By the end of this book, they have been through a phenomenal number of tests and battles. Some rise above selfishness and traditional prejudices, some don’t. Some will break your fucking heart.
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| Why Pierce Brown Might Be Fiction’s Next Superstar (Source) |
But mostly you’ll cheer for these brave champions of liberty and be amazed at their feats of derring do. They always have each other’s back.
“A man thinks he can fly, but he is afraid to jump. A poor friend pushes him from behind.” He looks up at me. “A good friend jumps with.”I also love that Darrow strives to retain his core kindness, his conviction that people always strive to be their best selves if you give them a chance. Despite all the times it bites him in the ass. Despite his abrupt immersion in the selfish, unforgiving Gold culture that subjugates an interplanetary slave labor force. This is his connection to his heritage, to the loving family and friends he grew up with, to the vibrant community at the heart of Red culture, and it keeps him centered during lonely, torturous times.
Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel.
My final verdict? On to book 4!
This series had a lot of enthusiastic recommendations from fellow fantasy lovers to live up to. And it did! But I am glad I knew what to expect. Because even though it’s very good, the plot in book 1 lags at times and then seems a bit unoriginal, for all the meticulously crafted and highly distinctive fictional planet around it. (However, I think there was a lot more going on than I recognized.)I also knew the next two books would probably blow me away, and I was ready for them! It’s such a treat to finally dive in to a new author and series you’ve been impatiently dying to meet for months and months.
Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.I confess to some battle fatigue at times. There were a LOT of battles — under and above ground, on various planetary bodies, and aboard spaceships. And I was simultaneously binge-rewatching the entire Game of Thrones TV series, which is also chock FULL of battles. But the pace moved so quickly that I’d soon get swept up in the next big zig that I expected to zag. I’d realize I was merely anticipating battle fatigue, then the author would upend the story, and Yikes! Just like Game of Thrones, I was immediately immersed again, hungry for more. Clever author.
I’m delighted that this isn’t the end of Darrow and his rebel warriors! The Red Rising saga continues in Iron Gold — which is the first book in a second trilogy set 10 years after the end of Morning Star. I look forward to reading Iron Gold in June with the book group who recommended this series to me. And then it’s on to Dark Age, which releases on July 9!
I’m pretty excited to start the next trilogy, but then it’ll be a long slog til the final book. I’ve heard great things about the audiobooks for this series, so I just might give them a spin to refresh my memory before then. I think these are the sort of books that will reveal much nuance and detail during a reread that I missed the first time through in my haste to find out what happens next!
“You and I keep looking for light in the darkness, expecting it to appear. But it already has.” I touch his shoulder. “We’re it, boyo. Broken and cracked and stupid as we are, we’re the light, and we’re spreading.”This Wench rates the Red Rising trilogy
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