Lemonade Book Reviews

I decided to pick up Red Rising by Pierce Brown as a palette cleanser after finishing the Realm of the Elderlings. My palette was certainly cleansed of good writing and an author who respects women. I did not like Red Rising. It’s been loosely on my TBR since the peak of the YA dystopia rage in the mid-2010s, but I never felt super called to read it. Having now read it, I can see why it was so popular in those circles. It’s basically a gender swapped (worse) Hunger Games. Darrow comes from miners who use singing and dancing as a form of rebellion. There’s a caste system. A lot of people have Greco-Roman names. Kids are fighting each other to the death in a controlled arena that’s supposed to represent “society without rules”. The Hunger Games is one of the best trilogies ever written in my opinion and deserves to be taught in schools for the rest of time, so I think most authors are not going to be able to reach the level that Suzanne Collins achieved when she wrote those books. Pierce Brown falls incredibly short of her mark, though. It is so clear that every word in The Hunger Games has been chosen carefully, with the goal of examining society ending a message through the books. The message in Red Rising is comparatively unclear.

WARNING: SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT

A big part of my issue with the book is Darrow. I typically don’t call characters Mary Sues because I have seen that label indiscriminately applied to women characters since I was able to access the internet. However, Darrow is a Mary Sue. He is literally perfect and can do no wrong. For example, I thought he was going to have to cut his leg off at the very beginning of the book when he gets stuck on a drill somehow. But no, he’s so amazing and special that he manages to get out of this near-certain death situation with a few mild burns, apparently. His actions and his internal monologue don’t seem aligned to me. He knows that he’s lower than the Golds and the Grays and is rude to the Grays, but he also believes in the value of his work and doesn’t feel exploited by them. If that’s the case, I don’t understand why he has beef with the Grays. Clearly there’s a violent history here, but it isn’t explored or explained at all. Maybe there’s supposed to be a level of cognitive dissonance, but it feels poorly done. Also, he and Eo discover trees and grass and don’t question why there are trees and grass (and giant spiders who make spider silk?) on their barren planet. I just don’t think the opening of the book is well done at all. Also, Darrow had incredible amounts of plot armor. I knew he was going to win the competition in the school because the plot required him to win. The only tension I felt during that part of the book was gay sexual tension between Darrow and Cassius.

Speaking of Eo, where did she even get the information to think that the Golds were enslaving them? She has revolutionary ideas at the beginning of the book, but if this society controls information to the point that the lowReds don’t even know there are other people on the planet, I can’t understand where she got them from. It feels like Brown wanted the aesthetics and brutality of an authoritarian dystopia but didn’t actually think through how that dystopia worked. Also, he needed Eo to be special and different and to provide Darrow with a call to action by dying. I think Eo and I would get along great if she was a real person, but as a character in a novel, she pisses me off. Eo is lambda clan’s most beautiful and special girl and everyone wanted to marry her but she was waiting for even specialer Darrow. She’s also a “dreamer” and wants better for their people, unlike everyone else apparently. She gets to be both the manic pixie dream girl and the fridged wife, and it pisses me off. I guess my anger is with Pierce Brown and not Eo though, because those were not the only misogynistic writing choices in the book.

THE MISOGYNY. Why do I know exactly how fuckable the male characters find every named and unnamed female character? Women are mentioned in passing and we learn if Darrow or whichever asshole he’s with would fuck that woman. Also, the only “good” female characters are members of Darrow’s family, his wife, and the person he’s going to move on from his wife with. There also seems to be an implicit assumption that women are weaker or less capable of becoming “iron gold” than men. The highDrafts in Mars house seem to be all men except Antonia, and it appears that men are the leaders of all houses except Minerva and Diana (which is appropriate to their status in Greek mythology as virgin goddesses but I don’t think Brown was thinking about that). Also, the houses that we’re told to be afraid of are Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Apollo, all male gods. Minerva, Ceres, Venus, Juno, and Diana all get taken out relatively early. The misogyny in the book gave me a real Ender’s Game vibe, since it’s explicitly stated in that book that girls typically don’t have the killer instinct (or whatever) that they need to get through battle school. It’s the author’s misogynistic worldview getting imprinted on a world that tells us it has relative gender equality. Admission to the Institute in Red Rising is complicated and obviously not entirely meritocratic, but it’s based on a test of intelligence, not violence. There shouldn’t be as vast a gender disparity as there seems to be from the book.

Violence in the book was also relatively sexualized, which really stood out to me while they were fighting their war game or whatever. Darrow’s transition from Red to Gold is relatively violent and there is tension from the implication that the plastic surgeon wants to fuck his creations, but that’s not really an issue to me. It shows us how sexual violence is handled in this world. Everything that happens in the Institute is kind of overly sexual though. First, they have to fight each other to the death while naked, ostensibly to “toughen up”. Darrow fights another boy, but I don’t think all of the match-ups were same sex. Darrow thinks that a lot of what happens at the Institute is to show people how to build a civilization/empire, and if we look at what happens through that lens, this feels icky. The nakedness is there just to be brutal. They could fight each other to the death wearing a cotton onesie. Then, once they get into the arena, the proctors let them rape other students (and this somehow never happens to the male students despite rape being about power and not sexual attraction). While male characters don’t face the constant threat of sexual assault, they are assaulted in ways that read as kind of kinky? There were a lot of actions that, in a kink context, would be hot, like when Cassius gets pissed on by a circle of people.

Something I’ve done without realizing it for a long time is try to imagine myself in the world of a story or in a historical society. Since I am a woman, this can have varied results. If I was a Gold woman at the Institute, I would be in constant fear of rape, and it doesn’t even get acknowledged by the main character. In my opinion, that’s because the author doesn’t understand the world he’s created, not because Darrow doesn’t care about sexual assault. It also tries to legitimize this idea that’s popular in grimdark fantasy that without modern society, women would be in constant danger of rape from every man in their life. I absolutely hate this idea because I think it’s ahistorical and it does a disservice to men by painting every man, regardless of morals, as someone who’s just waiting to rape. I have a really specific pet peeve about this as someone with a shitty neurodivergent father who also loves fantasy literature.

Now finally, we can move to the gay corner. Darrow and Cassius had SO MUCH sexual tension when they were besties. I was annoyed that the proctors gave the Jackal a device for watching videos (can’t remember what it’s called) with a video of Darrow killing Julian because I wanted to keep watching the gay strife and angst. It would have been much more powerful to force Darrow into a situation where he has to tell Cassius what happened to his face. Also, wouldn’t they have had to explain to the Jackal who both of the people in the video were? Very funny to think about that. Anyway, Cassius obviously sucked, but he and Darrow were obviously in love with each other. Every description of Cassius is about how beautiful and golden he is, and Cassius is constantly treating Darrow like a nepo baby. Mustang, who Darrow is ostensibly attracted to, doesn’t even get described as much as Cassius. This plus the narrative’s general disinterest in women makes me think that Darrow is gay.

Not a lot to say about neurodivergency in this one, other than that the author doesn’t acknowledge it and has weird ideas about intelligent people. One of the reason’s Darrow is so special is because he has high “extrapolational intelligence”, so basically he makes really good guesses. I would call this getting lucky, not intelligence. When we’re showed Darrow using this intelligence, he is able to come to the correct conclusion immediately and without second guessing himself. He is gathering information about his world and coming to a conclusion quickly. That doesn’t mean that the conclusion is correct, and it’s crazy to me that Brown never acknowledges this. Maybe he’ll come to incorrect assumptions in future books (not planning on reading them currently), but it drove me crazy that everyone in-world acted like he was a genius for getting lucky that he was making good guesses. Also, while we’re here, if you’ve collected the best and brightest through this test, you’ve probably collected some autistic and ADHD people. The only character who even feels non-neurotypical to me is Sevro, and it’s implied that he performed poorly in his tests. That does come from one of Darrow’s assumptions, so I think he’s wrong, but it’s clear that Brown wasn’t interested in telling a story about highly intelligent people. It adds to the world’s aesthetic to have a bunch of super geniuses killing each other because “that’s how the real world is” *jack off motions*. But I do think that Sevro was one of the highest scorers and was selected last because of his dad being a proctor. They’re also all just assuming that the pairs for killing each other were based on placement in the draft, but I think Sevro probably killed a rando and Cassius killed Priam.

Race plays an important role in this world, but after we get into the game, we kind of stop thinking about it. I know Darrow needed to stay in survival mode, but this is another way that the themes of the book kind of got pushed to the wayside. I’m white so I don’t think I can do justice to looking at this book through a lens of race, but it felt weird that we didn’t get many physical descriptions of people outside of eye and hair color (which seems to be the same as their color for everyone? We’re only told about the Reds and the Golds in depth). Given that Brown seems to be writing from his own experience, I don’t know how much he thought about the racialized aspects of his world.

In conclusion, I did not enjoy this book. It was deeply mid. I got through it quickly and easily because the plot moves along fairly well, but there was so much heinous shit that happened for aesthetics or rule of cool that I didn’t care. I don’t like when sexualized violence happens without there being a thematic reason for it. I didn’t like that there was a sex slave class. I did like the homoerotic tension, and I wish that Darrow had been forced to tell Cassius about Julian or had gotten caught in a lie rather than the plot needing to move along so Cassius gets a special package from the Jackal. My favorite quote was when Darrow described developing feelings for Mustang after Eo’s death as being “like spring after winter”. So true bestie.