Golden Son (Book 2 of the Red Rising Trilogy) by Pierce Brown (5 stars)

10% of the way into this book I thought I could see how this was going to play out. There'd be a training montage with Lorn au Arcos and Darrow would win the day with his characteristic mix of audacity and cunning. I was wrong. This is not a simple story.  It's complicated, with plenty of failures, characters evolving, lots of unexpected turns and main characters dying at incredibly inconvenient times. Not quite Game of Thrones character destruction, but it's close.

Which is a long-winded way to say it's great. In fact, it achieves what almost no sequel ever does, it's better than the first book. Brown completely breaks out of the Hunger Games world into a huge and complex space operatic rebellion spanning many planets.

Characters which were painted as purely evil are evolved into something much more: we realise that Augustus is a cunning player of political games and military strategy. He's capable of kindness but can be ruthless when he deems it necessary.

I'm only a monster when it is practical.

As the book goes on we are on a journey of discovery with the Darrow: he's discovering just how much responsibility he has taken on, and is gradually realising he has no practical plan to reach his goals. He's beginning to question what winning would even look like. Each time he seems to be closing in on a winning strategy there is a new problem to overcome. The weakness here is that it seems to fall into a bit of a pattern: betrayal causes failure, an unlikely rescue, and then a big audacious success.

Along the way there are actually some fascinating insights into power and strategy:

That is a slow power. Cleverly done on his part, if unfit for my name. Slow power can grind away any stagnant enemy. But fast power, one that can travel where you go, do what you wish it to as effectively as a hammer hitting a nail, that is the power that lops off heads and steals crowns.

And Brown keeps us guessing about who Ares is for basically the entire book. Darrow voiced exactly what I was thinking about Ares:

“What if it’s just a Gold trick? Someone pulling strings to make Society go the way they need it to go. What if it’s all a lie?” 

Vague spoilers ahead.

Just when it looks like the Reaper has a winning move things get turned on their head. I was particularly impressed with the outcome of the underwater battle, although the action itself had unbelievable elements like quite a few of the action scenes in the book. No-one holds their breath that long. It was brutal, due to the emotional attachment you have to the Reaper and a desperate desire to want him to succeed, but it was a clever plot direction.

The ending is shocking, in a Red Wedding kind of way. A brilliant dash of chaos that had me reaching for the next book. How can they possibly continue now?

5 stars.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown (4 stars)

This book is quite unusual in a number of ways. The first is that the opening paragraph is unusually, spectacularly terrible. This over-dramatic entrance is basically every "in a world" movie trailer:

I watch twelve hundred of their strongest sons and daughters. Listening to a pitiless Golden man speak between great marble pillars. Listening to the beast who brought the flame that gnaws at my heart.

I did not ride horses through meadows and eat meals of humming-bird tongues. I was forged in the bowels of this hard world. Sharpened by hate. Strengthened by love.

In a world....one man...driven by his desire for humming-bird tongues....

But it's also unusual in that the writing quality of the entire rest of the book is actually very high, it's just a really bad start.

This is the first novel of the trilogy and it can almost completely be described as the hunger games on mars (with elements of Ender's Game and Divergent), and yet, in a unusual twist, the series breaks this mold and gets much stronger, more interesting, and more complex in the subsequent books. Something neither the hunger games or ender achieved.

It's chock-full of violence and follows teenage underdogs from a stratified oppressed society outwitting a rigged, violent competition to win the day. Like I said, Hunger Games. It follows a very familiar formula, but is hugely entertaining, and I couldn't put it down.

Some spoilers ahead.

There's plenty of flaws, like how Darrow is the only solidly developed character, and Sevro should basically be called deus ex Sevro. And how no-one, including tons of random customers in a nightclub, thinks to sell out Darrow as he slowly gets carved into Gold. And how Darrow creates a ridiculous bond-villain-style trap for the Jackal, which he is obviously going to escape, instead of just killing his most dangerous rival.

The ending is also very pat and clean, which is completely implausible after the havoc Darrow creates. But never fear, everything gets very messy and much more interesting in the following books.

4 stars.