Red Rising

Title: Red Rising

Series: Red Rising Trilogy - book 1

Author: Pierce Brown

Rating: 5 stars

Genre: Science Fiction

Number of Pages: 382

Publication Date: 2014

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Summary: 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 Red 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 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. But the command school is a battlefield - and Darrow isn't the only student with an agenda.

Red Rising was not what I expected. When I first heard about this book I was intrigued but was not expecting to be amazed. I figured that this was just another book in which the repressed attempt to overthrow those that are the oppressors. Instead I was faced with a book that does this while also pointing out the faults in human nature and looking deep in to the mind of what fundamentally makes a person who they are.

Red Rising follows 17 year old Darrow, a Red, a miner of Mars, attempting to make Mars inhabitable as Earth's resources dye out. But then Darrow discovers that Mars has had people living on it for hundreds of years, and his life has been a lie - he is nothing more than a slave to the system. Following the execution of his wife, Eo, Darrow finds himself involved with a group of rebels who want him to help take the Golds down from the inside by pretending to be one of them after some intensive transformations.

The characters that Pierce Brown has created are perhaps some of the most well thought out and in depth characters that I have ever met, even if you only see them for a page or two. Each character has got a clear back story that influences their decisions and actions in the book while not coming across as an over bearing backlog of information.

The characters also balance with the story line of this book. There is nothing worse than when you get stuck with a character who doesn't quite mesh with the plot. The characters of Red Rising always have a purpose, no character is just there to fill in space. Each character is there to show you the fundamentals of who the Golds are as a group or to teach the reader some detail about the plot.

But be warned this book can be incredible dark and gruesome at times. When I read the summary and it said that school was a battlefield, I must admit I figured it was the kind of battlefield where people try to out play each other mentally...in reality, it's a battlefield...as in the kind where people slaughter each other or risk being slaughtered themselves. Yet despite this the book is still absolutely amazing.

This book gets an easy 5 stars.