Morning Star by Pierce Brown

Morning Star by Pierce Brown - 524 pages

Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society’s mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within.

Finally, the time has come.

But devotion to honor and hunger for vengeance run deep on both sides. Darrow and his comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are some Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire those shackled in darkness to break their chains, unmake the world their cruel masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied—and too glorious to surrender. 

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

Golden Son by Pierce Brown - 430 pages

As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants. But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow’s kind have been betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds—and their only path to liberation is revolution. And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name of the greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration, laid down her own life. He becomes a Gold, infiltrating their privileged realm so that he can destroy it from within. 

A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow finds friendship, respect, and even love—but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind’s destiny, Darrow must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution—and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead is fraught with danger and deceit, Darrow must choose to follow Eo’s principles of love and justice to free his people. 

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Red Rising by Pierce Brown - 382 pages

"I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.

Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown

Red Rising Trilogy - Pierce Brown - 1390 pages

The tl:dr version of my review is this: don't waste time putting your pants on, run out RIGHT NOW and grab this whole trilogy. Don't bother with socks either, because they're about to be BLOWN OFF into the inky blackness of emotionally unforgiving space.

I am a commitment-phobe when it comes to series reads, because I've been burned before (I'm looking at you, Laurel K.). But I passed by this one on the shelf several times and finally picked up Red Rising despite what I thought was my better judgement.  This series proceeded to surprise, engage, and utterly emotionally destroy me, and isn't that what we're all looking for in a great book, after all?

The upshot of the story is that Darrow, a young dude who lives and works in the dangerous mines of Mars, witnesses his equally young wife commit a relatively innocuous act of treason by speaking out in her way about the injustice of the caste system their society has imposed. She's hung for it, and in their Red tradition, Darrow is forced to participate by pulling her feet to snap her neck.  It's an eloquent metaphor for everything Darrow does over the course of the trilogy, from subjecting himself to extensive surgeries that make him one of the pinnacle elite Golds, to molding himself into an instrument of violence and war.  He is forced over and over again to make the choice between preserving his personal humanity and offering it up as a sacrifice for what he believes is the greater good.

But this guy is not a messiah of Red or Gold. (Okay, well...there was this one time...two times? Whoops. Maybe there is room to draw a parallel there.) He's desperately, basely human in so many ways, from the love he shares with his new bloodthirsty family to the strategic mistakes he makes in both over- and underestimating the people around him. And that's really what's at the heart of these stories: humanizing the big picture, and a mix of grand scale loss with the intimate losses that win or lose the war.  It could not be more personal than witnessing and participating in a revolution with Darrow the Reaper as he builds family and loses family for his cause. That cobbled-together family crosses all the castes, and each member of it humanizes another strata in this dystopian society where your Color defines who you are.

Real talk: I can't say I wasn't kind of frustrated by the message here; Darrow struggles internally with the difference of change through peaceful measures and through violent ones, and I really wanted him to find a peaceful out even if that meant a dreadfully boring third book. That does not happen, and these books are a bloodbath. By the third book, I was seriously concerned that none of the characters were going to make it to the last pages...and not very many did. But Brown is a master of twisting the knife by orchestrating emotional and symbolic deaths for almost every character. He also has a great handle on the negative space of novel crafting; you are literally in Darrow's head for every twist, every strategic happening, and Brown still manages to surprise and mislead in a way that makes this story an adventure on every page. It's a trilogy that demands that you appreciate the orchestrated violence and also appreciate the depth of the philosophical questions the premise raises about our own society. Borrowing a gaming term, it's a tank of a thinker.

In terms of relatively contemporary works, this trilogy combines elements of several mythologies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Tolkien's works, and the first book in particular could generally be described as The Hunger Games on some kind of hypothetical literary steroid that makes book muscles and brains explode by interplanetary proportions. It's thoughtful, extraordinarily and creatively violent, and it's unsettlingly timely to the social struggles we're facing right now. It is a trilogy well worth the emotional scarring you will suffer reading it. Get some kleenex, prepare to cringe through the next 1300+ pages, and resign yourself to staying up until 4am to finish "just one more chapter." It is an amazing ride.