I finished ‘Red Rising’ earlier this week and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s two parts action, one part personal drama for the Red Helldiver Darrow as he embarks on a quest to topple the tyranny of the elite Gold rulers that keep his people in slavery. Since this book has been popular for a while, there’s not much I can say about it that hasn’t been said already, except that yeah, it lived up to the hype for me. I haven’t read a solid action novel with a plot and personal arc to match in a long time. The main character Darrow is such a strong character that he lends the whole book a relentless momentum all the way through to the end (and I’m assuming for the rest of the series too). He has a powerful drive and an ever-evolving skill set of interesting new ways to destroy his oppressors, yet these hard-edged elements of his character are tempered by his growing affection for new allies and enemies alike. There’s never a dull moment, but spots of breathing room here and there lend the heart-pumping action a well-paced quality so it never becomes overwhelming.

Like most everybody else I’ve talked to about it, I don’t have much other than praise for this novel. The sci-fi elements melded seamlessly into the story to make the world feel both unique and easy to digest. It’s sci-fi at its best, posing intriguing social and technological questions to explore potential answers through the perspective of the characters. Mostly those questions it begs have all been asked already, but the package overall is so gripping that I didn’t even care how much it relied on established genre tropes. That said, no element was without Brown’s unique spin, and his ability to craft a good character is better than a lot of the other iterations of dystopic sci-fi. I can’t say I ever felt like this book was ever going to get anything but better as it went and I can’t wait to read the rest.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley