I’m trying out adding mini-book reviews of the things I read here. I am not a book reviewer. I have specific, quirky tastes. This will all become clear over time.
The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown has the ingredients that I love: rich world-building, an ever growing cast, spaceships(yay!) … and yet, after the first three books this series has fallen short, for me … personally. I expected that this would hold a place in my heart right next to Sanderson’s The Way of Kings or S.A. Corey’s Expanse.
For me, it just doesn’t.
Which is a little bit odd, because it certainly did for the first three books. I devoured them. It very much reminded me of the other two series I mentioned … we start with a singular protagonist. We meet some other characters. The scope of the story widens. We add protagonists and antagonists. We have unexpected deaths to remind us that there is less plot armor than one might think. The protagonists step onto ever larger stages.
Man, I eat that stuff up.
But I think I lost the sense of scale with this one. The stage has become SO big that people became statistics. I find myself connecting with fewer and fewer characters, including losing touch with our primary protagonist. People were in jeopardy and I didn’t really care. They had triumphs and defeats. Friends were lost. And I only found that I cared about two or three amongst what felt like a sea of characters.
I finished the book and I am not sad that I read it. It was just more work than I thought it would be, because I was reading chapters about events and from a character view point that simply didn’t register as important or interesting for me.
The positives:
The final section (third? quarter?) started to draw me back in just in time for the book to end.
There are some compelling characters that I did really enjoy following, but they were not major POV characters.
The negatives:
The first half felt like a set-up for the next book, in hindsight.
There is a LOT going on politcally, and you have plenty of action sequences to make it hard to keep it all in your head.
Again, I just didn’t care when some of these folks faced peril. Live? Die? Whatever…
The Verdict: 3.5 stars
Again, it wasn’t a BAD book. It was just a bit of a slog without a super rewarding payoff. The next book could prove me wrong by tying it all together in amazing ways, but I didn’t want to work so hard just so an author could get all the pieces in their positions. If you adore the series, read it. FInd out what happens to that characters you love. If you haven’t looked at this series, the first three are solid. YMMV.
