Red Rising by Pierce Brown is about a whiny teenage boy who thinks he’s God’s gift to humanity wants to live out his life in a piss-soaked space suit, but is convinced otherwise by the needless martyrdom of his child bride.
A whiny teenage boy who thinks he’s God’s gift to humanity wants to live out his life in a piss-soaked space suit, but is convinced otherwise by the needless martyrdom of his child bride.
Darrow wants nothing from life to prove that he’s The Bees Knees. Think I’m kidding? The first part of the book is wholly focused on how amazing he thinks he is and upset other people can’t see it. Finally, he’s brow-beaten into becoming a better man by his wife dying. And even then all he can talk about is how angry he is at said child bride for daring to up and die on him, forcing him (from beyond the grave) to be the better man he categorically does not want to be.
She didn’t even have to die, that’s the stupid thing.
Her choosing to die – practically orchestrating her death so that Darrow could go be A Better Man(TM) – was the most unnecessary plot device since fridging female characters was solidified by The Green Lantern. I know I’m not in the majority with this one, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I have zero tolerance for narratives glorifying narcissistic men (no matter how young).
The writing is too repetitive and melodramatic for me, and the characterisations are so stereotypical and thin I got a headache from all the eye-rolling I did while reading. It was like riding inside the head of a teenage narcissist and reading this book felt like a chore to get through. It made me feel like I hate reading in general and should never read a book ever again – something that I can genuinely say has never happened to me before.
There were so many plot holes I stopped counting around the time I had to hear about that piss-suit yet one more time.
DNF’d around 70% because I could just not fuel my depression any longer and chose life instead. Up to that point, the only thing that kept me going was rewriting the story to something tolerable in my head.
And it just makes me angry that selfish, whiny men are being lionized as something that young women (since this is YA) should love so much that they’re willing to sacrifice their own dreams and aspirations for them. Young readers deserve SO MUCH better than that, especially in a world that is already so patriarchal.
I’m tempted to call this patriarchal propaganda, but I’ll refrain as a lot of the narrative elements were so higgledy-piggledy it can’t be intentional. Just a bog-standard expression of the patriarchy.
What would my rewrite be? Thought you’d never ask!
I’m going to be rude and give my rewrite for this because this was how I managed to get as far in the book as I did.)
We’d start the story with child bride Eo and how she longs to fight the fascists, but her husband is a boring old prick who wants to support the status quo (because change and the possibility of him losing his precious alpha male status frightens him, this part I’d keep the same as it is now).
So she takes drastic action and runs away to join the resistance – just before telling him she’s pregnant and she won’t have her child live this same life (women have been doing this for centuries, so we even have a precedent for this).
Then Darrow gets to whine and wallow in his own self pity (as in the current book), but eventually he decides that life without Eo is just not worth it so he runs after her. Or maybe he chases after her to bring her back, but is irrevocably changed by the journey, what he experiences and his wife’s conviction – eventually becoming central to the resistance, infiltrating and overthrowing the Golds.
Now, that’s a story I’d read.
If you want to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Take your pick of freebie you’d like to get when you sign up 👇
One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
