Red Rising

Red Rising - Pierce Brown

2/5 Stars

The Earth is dying.

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.

DNF at around 60%

After just starting The Way of Kings, I really can't see myself picking this book back up. Dystopian books just really aren't my thing, but they say your taste buds change every seven years so I gave it a shot! However, I definitely need to wait a couple more years... 

Pros 

There were actually a fair few things I liked about this book, as I thought it used a few interesting ideas to build up this world. For example, how you have to pull a man's legs when they're being hung to combat gravity etc. I thought these little bits of detail were really cool and I could tell a lot of thought was put into the world building. 

While I didn't really care much for the world, I thought that the actual amount of time spent to world building was perfect. Too often in YA, world building takes a back seat, but I thought Red Rising did a good job of exploring this Sci-Fi world without disrupting the overall pace of the story. It is also important to note that I never tend to like books, which are set in space or anything like that, but if you do...Then I think you'd really enjoy this world.

Cons

I could not stand the writing in this book! I just found it excruciating to read, as it consistently used short sentences, which over dramatised every single thing and it just got exhausting. Darrow could be getting dressed and it would be like... 

I bend down and pick up the sock. It feels different. Everything feels different now. I slip it on my left foot and pause. Something is wrong. I gasp out in panic. It's a Tuesday. These are my Wednesday socks. I have to be more careful.

Okay that may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point. That's honestly how every paragraph felt for me and it was just so unnecessarily exhausting and left me disconnected from the plot.

I also really didn't like how Eo was used, as she was literally only there to serve as motivation for Darrow. It's like the Author thought "Oh, my main character lacks motivation... I know Let's (anyone who has read it knows)... It just felt really cheap to me.

This book also started out very Cliche, which I actually don't mind in books. It just happens to be that I don't like many Sci-Fi or dystopian Cliches... So I was just left annoyed at how predictable the start was. However, things did pick up and the story started to become its own by around 150 pages, but by this point I had lost all interest and concentration to even understand what was happening. 

With all this considered, I don't actually think this is a 'bad book' and I do think that anyone, who likes Sci-Fi dystopians, would really enjoy this read. Unfortunately this genre just isn't for me, but hey... You can't like everything :(