Golden Son (Red Rising Saga, #2) in 2015 Reading Challenge [Closed]

Sep 12, 2015 Mary Anne rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, series, library, kindled, scifi, ya

Oh, this book. This book.

I feel like I could be really repetitive in comparing this book to the first book, Red Rising. I'm rereading that review so I don't completely muck it up.

Okay I'm good. So a lot of the same problems, for me, are worse in this one. Let's start with the little bits that I almost liked about this book.

First, props to Mr Brown for creating a very wide-ranging story. If we're talking about a revolution here (think Hunger Games times roughly 30), it's going to take more than o Oh, this book. This book.

I feel like I could be really repetitive in comparing this book to the first book, Red Rising. I'm rereading that review so I don't completely muck it up.

Okay I'm good. So a lot of the same problems, for me, are worse in this one. Let's start with the little bits that I almost liked about this book.

First, props to Mr Brown for creating a very wide-ranging story. If we're talking about a revolution here (think Hunger Games times roughly 30), it's going to take more than one book. It might take more than three books. (I would argue that Mr Brown gets around this by skipping over several years between books one and two and even within this particular book.) But look, a major revolution takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of small steps, and it requires a lot of failure with strategic winning. A lot of players are involved, and Brown certainly knows that and has taken that into account. There was a lot happening in the first book, and there is even more happening in this book.

Secondly, there is a glimpse of range in Darrow. It's two out of 465 pages, hence why I say "glimpse." We almost never see Darrow feeling overwhelmed (I suppose he's just never overwhelmed; it's not that he's hiding it; he just has no ~feels), but for those two pages, he has some emotion. He can't let people in, and interestingly, that's the source of some of his worst mistakes. People who follow him so willingly expect to get something in return. And they get some respect, yes, but they don't get the kind of friendship or trust they expect. And some people really don't like that. They don't like to invest themselves so much in that type of person. It makes Darrow seems less human. That effectively dovetails into why I really don't like Darrow, but at least now I can say that Brown seems to have deliberately made Darrow into such an unrelatable character.

That's why I just can't go into the third book. I can't handle Darrow. I just can't. It's not that I don't like him. I just don't care about him or about this world he's narrating. I didn't enjoy the reading at all, and I just can't find the reason to invest more time in this series. There are too many other characters (though it doesn't really matter if you remember them because they are not Darrow) and too much skipping over. I presume the skipping over is because that material isn't as fun or is inconvenient (or would just make a bad book longer), but writers do it all the time, and quite a few of them are actually successful at it. Not here.

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