Blake’s Books

Last updated on February 1, 2016

Blake’s Books

By Blake Bouza// Contributing Writer

Welcome back to the Settler’s book review. My name is Blake and I will be sifting through the myriad of books that are released to bring you the best of what you could be reading.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

The Earth is dying. Darrow is a Red, a miner in the interior of Mars. Mars has been habitable – and inhabited – for generations, by a class of people calling themselves the Golds. A class of people who look down on Darrow and his fellows as slave labor, to be exploited and worked to death without a second thought.

Until the day that Darrow, with the help of a mysterious group of rebels, disguises himself as a Gold and infiltrates their command school, intent on taking down his oppressors from the inside. But the command school is a battlefield – and Darrow isn’t the only student with an agenda.

(from Goodreads.com)

I am so impressed with this work of fiction. Pierce Brown never tells us more than we need to know – giving us a lean, sinewy, sledgehammer-to-the-face kind of novel that manages to both be brutal and poetic, as illustrated by the novel’s own integration of both futuristic technology that is actually plausible with barbaric living and fighting.

By cutting away the fat, so to speak, Brown immerses us in three separate yet cohesive casts of society. The low Reds underground, the hoity-toity upscale lifestyle of the Golds in their Emerald City, and the brutal landscape of the Institute where the Houses compete to be on top.

I understand the comparisons that have likened this book to a cross between The Hunger Games and A Game of Thrones. Honestly, it is what got me to pick up the book.

Red Rising does have elements of those two books, yes, but it is so uniquely its own work that the similarities are shallow at best. Here we have an epic that stands alongside with The Odyssey and The Iliad. Only this time the gods are Proctors of the Institute and the fool humans doing their bidding are the students trying to keep the reputation of their House. The book takes a number of sharp turns as we follow Darrow twist the system against the Institute.

Definitely a trilogy you should begin. The second book, Golden Son, came out earlier this year and is even better than the first in my opinion. The third book, Morning Star (religious symbolism anyone?), comes out this January. Now is the perfect time to pick this one up.

5/5 Stars