Review: Red Rising

Red Rising by Pierce Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is so unbearably, cruelly naive, I'm having a really hard time understanding how it got the "best book" badge. And though it's most often tagged as science fiction, at least it wasn't the best science fiction 2014 ([book:The Martian|18007564] was). This one is about as scientific as a kitchen table. I usually don't do it, but at some point the sheer number of blunders and glaring mistakes made me want to check the author's background, his education in particular. What did I find out? Nothing. The wiki page is empty but for some information about his three books. The official web page and goodreads profile repeat the "biography" given on the last page of the book, word to word, with that rubbish about getting to Hogwarts after college. I wasn't amused enough to try to dig deeper. This "mysteriousness" is as childish as the plot. Several times along the book I felt as if it was written by a teenager, and it's not a compliment here, because the author is apparently is a grown man. Or maybe not so grown...

The naivety is not the only sin of this book, far from that actually. The author has some big problems visualizing things. Descriptions of places are terrible to begin with: they don't provide an image, don't take the reader to some other world with some new experience, not at all. Worse than that, they are inconsistent. It's like the places, buildings, terrains, things shift to better suit the plot.  I tried to re-read some descriptions two or three times, to make at least some sense of them; it didn't help. The spatial orientation also suffers greatly, despite the map.

Places are not the only inconsistent things in the book. It feels like the protagonist exists in some sort of a bubble, outside of which the world stops, or better yet - doesn't exist at all. Like the author couldn't keep too much information in mind and partitioned it, forgetting everything outside the immediate surroundings of the protagonist. It creates a lot of confusion; things just don't add up. There should have been some unavoidable consequences of his actions that are never mentioned, much less happen. The apotheosis is a scene near the end, where Darrow fights two enemies in full armor. Only he can do anything about them, because he too is armored. They play havoc among Darrow's followers. Then he falls away with one of them, fights and defeats him, and return to the main scene, where ..... surprise! The second opponent never gets mentioned again. And there are a lot of loose ends, it's just one example (that sent me laughing under the table).

Some reviews suggest that the second book is much, much better. I wish to beleive it, but can't right now. Red rising is emotionally naive, poorly written, and intellectually immature. I will give a short to the second one, but surely not right away.

View all my reviews