From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

The story takes place on Mars, a fact I kept forgetting, and society’s various castes are now color-coded. The reds are miners, the golds are in charge, and I’m sort of unclear about what else is happening in between all of that. There’s a veritable rainbow of colors, and even some apparent variations on those (“high Gold”, for instance). Anyway, since this is a dystopia, our protagonist is of course the lowest of low classes. As far as Darrow has known, Mars is unfit for human habitation, so he and the other Reds live underground, basically terraforming the planet so the Golds left on Earth can come live there someday. At first, it’s your typical disaffected rebel story, and I was so sure I knew how it was going to go: after Darrow and his wife are arrested, his wife outs herself as a rebel during their punishment (she signs a forbidden song, calling to mind the scene in Catching Fire where the guy in District 11 is beaten to death for giving the 3 finger salute), which gets her marked as a traitor and hanged. Darrow finds himself facing the noose as well...now I can’t totally remember why, something to do with his wife, I think, but thanks to a drug his uncle slips him, he survives the hanging and is rescued by a secret group of rebels. So far so good on the predictable front at this point! And of course, Darrow keeps remembering his wife Eo, and wanting to carry out her wishes of rebellion, blah blah blah.

But then Brown drops a swerve on us -- turns out, the surface of Mars is perfectly fine, people have been living there for years. In fact, there are even “high” Reds who toil on the surface. The underground Reds are slaves...except they don’t totally realize it. They know they’re the lowest class, but they’re completely ignorant of what’s happening on the surface. Darrow, of course, is “the one” who can change all of that. The rebels send him to a Carver (which...Nip/Tuck flashbacks anyone? Just me?), basically a glorified plastic surgeon, who can turn him into a Gold, which will allow him to infiltrate the training academy and start the rebellion from within. All of Darrow’s transformation and training are sort of glossed over, which didn’t really bug me, because look: he’s the main character. We know everything will be successful and he’ll infiltrate and whatnot, because otherwise there’s no story. So it didn’t really bug me that Brown sort of montages over all of that in favor of getting at the meat of the narrative: The War.

The training academy reminded me a LOT of The Testing -- an assembly of the best and brightest, where only the top tier are admitted, with the rest facing certain death. I will say in The Testing’s favor that Charbonneau doesn’t shy away from shocking deaths (it’s the romance that killed that story for me!), but here it’s even more brutal. After splitting the 1,000 students into houses of 100, they’re faced with The Passage, in which students are paired off and forced to fight to the death, which culls each house’s herd of 100 down to 50. So your start at the Academy begins with murder. And of course, for maximum angst, Darrow must face his one kinda-sorta friend in The Passage: Julian, member of a prominent Mars family. And of course, Julian’s brother Cassius survives his own Passage, meaning it’s only a matter of time before he finds out Darrow killed his brother. But in the meantime the two form a friendship of convenience.

Anyway, the Academy is a little different than your typical school for evil geniuses in that it’s all a gigantic practical exam. The twelve houses are at war -- it’s essentially large-scale capture the flag. Each house has to conquer the others and take their standard (flag), and they have the means to enslave their captives along the way. Whoever is leader of the winning house is the top student of the year, and of course the best placed for job offers. In order to rebel successfully, Darrow needs to earn that top spot for himself, obviously. There are rules...ish to the warfare, and the proctors watch from floating Mount Olympus (this was the part that reminded me of Hunger Games -- watching children fight to the death is grand entertainment!), but it’s clear early on that certain people can get away with more than others. And there’s very much a survival of the fittest theme happening: of course outright killing a classmate is frowned upon, but if something fatal just...happens, well, that Gold probably wasn’t strong enough to make it through in the first place.

Darrow’s house is Mars (they’re named after the planets...and then also some Roman gods. The whole naming system is unclear...there’s Minerva and Juno and Apollo, and also Pluto...maybe it’s just Roman gods? I am so terrible with mythology!), and of course, they are the red headed stepchild of the Academy. Their proctor is an ass, and totally unhelpful, and it takes very little time for the students all to split off into groups and start fighting with each other, instead of teaming up to take down the other houses. This was where the How to Lead a Life of Crime comparisons happened -- everything is so brutal, and only the people who realize that this “game” is very much NOT a game have the best chances of survival.

The story itself is compelling -- after stop-starting quite a bit on the first 30-ish percent, I plowed through the bulk of it in an afternoon. The beginning is dull and predictable, because if you’ve read as much dystopia as I have, you know exactly where all of this is going...until the whole terraforming twist. Then everything proceeds at breakneck pace until the end. There are some plot holes with how the game is supposed to work, and some issues left unexplored (like the fact that Titus was also maybe-probably a Red? There’s barely time to process it before he’s executed. And also the whole “twins!” twist...it’s something I should have seen coming, but it also kind of comes out of nowhere). Also Darrow is a pain in the ass. He’s not exactly a martyr, but I was WAY over his whole attitude after about 5 pages. Yes, Golds are entitled, because they've never known life any other way. Yes, in order to rebel against the system, you’re probably going to have to kill many of these people, even the ones who don’t suck. He wasn’t whiny, exactly, but there was simply something off putting about Darrow’s general demeanor. And, as other reviewers have pointed out, he never really seems to struggle (I made the same point about Malencia in The Testing). Yes, the Carving is painful and his training is hard, but he picks everything up quickly, thanks to all of his training driving drills, and he’s an expert swordsman because he’s from a culture that values dancing...it’s all a little too convenient. Anything he doesn’t already excel at can simply be dropped into his head via a serum, or an injection, or some other magical means (which is a little Divergent-y for my tastes). Like...I get that Darrow needs to be the bestest, fastest, strongest because he has to rise to the top, but it might be more interesting to see him actually try> to become the best, instead of just waking up this way. I didn’t have much urge to root for him, mostly since I knew he’d eventually come out on top anyway (it’s a trilogy, after all), so it was kind of an interesting experience to read simply for plot rather than character. The plot is compelling, the characters are not.