Red Queen

“I'll make the other scream for you, Mare, every last one. Not just your parents. Not just your siblings. But every single one like you. I'm going to find them, and they will die with you in their thoughts, knowing this is the fate you have brought them. I am the king and you could've been my Red Queen. Now you are nothing.”

3.5 STARS

This book has gotten a lot of mixed reviews, and rightly should it. This is one of those books that makes some people go "AHHH!" with joy and others "ugh" with desperation, one that just creates a total dichotomy among the audience, and sometimes a book like that is good because it allows for a good debate to spring up between the two sides. But I think the main issue in this book is actually that it kind of seems like two different books in one. Let me explain. Our protagonist, Mare Barrow, lives in poverty and is a Red. This means that her blood is red, compared to the Silvers which, you guessed it, have silver blood. This is the basis of the social hierarchy in this dystopian/fantasy (I'll get to that later). She is described as plain and somewhat unintelligent, which causes her to be in the direct line of conscription into the army of Reds who fight all of the Silvers' wars while they live in luxury on the backs of the Reds. Our main premise is that Mare needs to get out of this draft, but by a crazy turn of events finds out that she has the ability to control lightning, and such superpowers are strictly limited to the Silvers, a group defined by their supernatural abilities. Now the beginning of this book held a ton of promise. I was fascinated by the world and by the difference in blood, especially scientifically because I wanted to know how this had possibly developed and I wish that this could have been better explained, but oh well. And then we get into the large section where Mare is simply a bauble in the castle, her Red-ness shielded by the royal family to cover up the fact that a Red could have the same ability of a Silver. And the book started to fall apart. Don't leave yet though! The climax at the end was perfect. I mean it. It was nearly absolute perfection; the suspense, the twist, the big boss battle, all of it was well executed and I was on the edge of my seat, or windowsill cause I was reading this on my roof at the time. Not a good place to be in retrospect, but anyway. Honestly I am really, really glad I stuck with this book because of the ending. It was fantastic and worth the boring 150 pages that preceded it. I think part of the reason a lot of people don't like it is because we were expecting a lot more magic battle sequences, but honestly during that chunk we got a lot of lessons and frustration and general boringness, but this is exactly what Mare was feeling, so I think that might have been Aveyard trying to connect us to her and for that props to her, but it didn't work quite as she was expecting, I think. The writing was adequate, not fantastic but not bad. This is definitely not a story based on the writing, but rather on the character development and the action, which is okay. The other thing that really threw me with this book was the worldbuilding. A lot of times I was really confused as to how to classify this book because it's in the future, but it has the very distinctive feel of a fantasy realm. But then you've got electricity, and some history, and generally is somewhat based in reality, which is really hard to understand and I think definitely needs to be fleshed out in the sequel. All around it was a fair novel and because of that ending I'll definitely be picking up the next installment. Share you thoughts!