Emily May's Reviews > Red Queen

I just... can't do it.

It was boring, light and silly, and I'm pretty sure I've already read the basic premise of this book in Pierce Brown's Red Rising.

I made it to 60% on my kindle and then skimmed for a bit, but I've been attempting to read this book for over a week now and the magic was evidently lost on me. When you're reading a book and you reach a point where you think "is it too soon to DNF this?", you know things must be bad. It's so sad, though, because everything about The Red Queen was just screaming "love me, Emily!" before I picked it up.

It's not because of the love triangle, either. I've said before that an author can easily sell me a well-executed love triangle - so nope, it wasn't that. Let me tell you a sad little truth about this book and I can take it straight from the blurb:

Graceling meets The Selection in debut novelist Victoria Aveyard's sweeping tale...

That's an odd mash-up to use in your marketing anyway. Like Gone Girl meets Twilight or something similar. But, whatever, there was a rather distinct lack of Graceling in that 60% I actually forced myself through. Maybe it comes later... but I no longer have any interest in sticking around to find out. There was way too much of The Selection's mean girl antics to make this book interesting.

The part of this book I read was sooooo slooooow. Painfully slow. We're introduced to a world that had potential but remained incredibly basic, bringing nothing particularly new to the table. There are two kinds of people in this world - Silvers and Reds. The former are the ruling class, have silver blood, and sometimes possess special abilities like mind control and elemental manipulation. The Reds are a slave class who are ruled over by the Silvers and live in poverty.

Mare is a Red who, in unexpected circumstances, discovers that she has powers of her own. In order to keep an eye on her and learn more about the powers she possesses, she is disguised as a Silver and trained within the Silver palace. All the other women in the novel instantly hate her (usually for no good reason) and all the men see sunshine radiating out of the pores of her skin (metaphor for "cue love triangle").

Ooookaayy. And this is the description for Red Rising:

Darrow is a Red, a miner in the interior of Mars. His mission is to extract enough precious elements to one day tame the surface of the planet and allow humans to live on it. The Reds are humanity's last hope.

Or so it appears, until the day Darrow discovers it's all a lie. That 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 labour, 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.

Of course, there's a revolution brewing in both books too. And both main characters pretend to be members of the other class. I mean... it's like the word "Gold" was just replaced with "Silver" and all the socialist angst was replaced with high school bitchy angst.

There was so little action in that first 60% that I literally had to force myself through pages and pages of Mare flirting with the Silver prince - Cal - and the prince's betrothed - Evangeline - hating Mare as soon as she set eyes on her. This book was a constant showdown between the innocent MC and the bitchy mean girl (and her gang of mean girls). Hell... you can even match the characters up to their high school cliques. And I'm sure Evangeline's meanness is going to be used as an excuse for Mare to run off with Cal and not lose any sleep over it. Maybe not... but probably.

The main problem for me was that the revolution and the bigger war going on between the Silvers and Reds wasn't given enough attention. I felt like the plot relied on the romantic aspect and the angst to propel it along. Neither of which I cared about.

Farley scoffs. "You want me to pin my entire operation, the entire revolution, on some teenaged love story? I can't believe this."
Across the table, a strange look crosses Kilorn's face. When Farley turns to him, looking for some kind of support, she finds none.
"I can," he whispers, his eyes never leaving my face.



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