I’ve been wanting to read this book for a few years and I was in between books so I finally checked it out. As an aside, then four other books became available from my queue so I have quite the backlog of reading to do at the moment. I digress.
I loved this book. I enjoyed it so much that while listening to it, I sought out the ebook so that I could read it in between commutes. It was a fun and exciting read. I already checked out the sequel, though I am curious to see where it goes. I’ve heard Red Rising compared to the Hunger Games and I wondered how the second book would be able to follow the first. I think Catching Fire was better than Hunger Games but I hope that Golden Son is different, rather than going back to the Thunderdome.
I think the Ender’s Game / Hunger Games analogy is very apt. I think it is more like Ender’s Game than HG but only because it is more about the plot and less about the romantic connections between characters. We have a school for special and important people who are bred to lead, an underdog who was really great once he got the chance, and fights and battles that lead to kids killing kids.
Wait!?! Is this YA? It’s PG-13 Battle Royale. Well, there’s more rape alluded in this than BR so it’s probably a hard R rating. Why is is YA then? Oh, that’s right the protagonist is only 16 and lives in a class-structured utopian future. I don’t really like the classification of Red Rising as YA.
The only really legitimate aspect of the YA title is that some of the themes are not as deep as they might be in adult literature. But I don’t consider that a pejorative statement, I think this is a great book. I simply mean that YA, as a genre, usually includes less characterization. Red Rising addresses lots of interesting topics and themes but in more of a cursory way than real exploration. It does a really good job of examining leadership and what leaders do, both good and bad. I think the characterization was excellent for most of the main characters but some ancillary characters seemed included only to advance the plot.
Again, this was a really fun read and I can’t wait to read more of the series.
I think we got into this argument on somebody’s review of book two a couple years ago. I don’t think this is YA, and some people market it as adult. There has been much Discussion, though.
I already feel like it isn’t. I think of Percy Jackson and HP, especially the early ones, as YA. I think Divergent is mostly YA but Hunger Games walks the line and leans more towards not….I should save all of this for my next review! I’m almost certainly going to reignite the debate.
In my local library, it is in the adult sci-fi/fantasy section. I think that’s a much better spot than the YA section.
Also, I had NO IDEA that a fourth book came out recently. Gotta get on that.
I didn’t know there was going to be a fourth book! I thought we were definitely 100% done after Morning Star?
:::goes to Goodreads::
Oh shoot, another trilogy. I guess I’m back in.
I of course can’t find the article or post anymore, but I know I read an interesting take on the fact that a lot of genre/fantasy novels tend to end up in YA because it is easier to sell them there. It certainly explains why so many of us read novels that are labeled as YA.
I love Sarah J. Maas novels and she is shelved in YA – which makes sense if we are looking at teens (I like how her characters and their relationships evolve, which is a nice message after so many stories with the one true first love), but there is definitely too much sex in those novels for her to be in the same category as Harry Potter or Percy Jackson.
SJM’s stories definitely started out as YA (the first book of Throne of Glass, for sure), but she’s totally transitioned to New Adult/Adult by now. Especially #5. It’s one of the reasons I find myself not sure what to do with Throne of Glass, because she very clearly wants to be writing adult fantasy that is taken seriously by an adult fantasy audience, but she’s still shelved as YA and has a YA audience.
The final two books in the Court of Thorns and Roses books certainly don’t fit into the YA sub-genre, unless really rather graphic love scenes are now totally fine in YA.
Throne of Glass was all about eating chocolate cake with your girlfriend and making out with the castle hottie. By #5 it’s clearly in explicit sex territory. One of the many reasons I quit the series is that it’s uncool to take a hit series aimed squarely at YA and add a bunch of sex into it.
Am waiting for the price of Iron Gold to come down (my local library won’t carry) but it’s definitely on my watch list.
It looks like Iron Gold is $4.31 now if you haven’t picked it up yet.
I would suggest reading these as close together as possible. Brown doesn’t really hold your hand with remembering who is who, and the character sheets at the beginning of each book are laughably slight. I loved these, and felt they got stronger as they went on because Brown expands his universe and gets away from the easy comparisons. Although, I think he goes a bit Tolkien all said.