Red Rising

Red Rising gets recommended a lot — and that might be part of the problem. By the time I picked it up, the expectations were high enough that the book had a lot to live up to.

It's a solid read. The premise is interesting: a mining colony on Mars with a rigid caste system, a protagonist who gets pulled into an undercover infiltration of the ruling class. It moves fast and there's real tension in the back half. I get why people like it.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen this before. The setup — young person from the bottom rung of society thrown into a brutal survival competition against their social betters — reads a lot like The Hunger Games, just with a space opera coat of paint. That's not necessarily a dealbreaker, but when a book gets hyped as something revolutionary, you notice the borrowed DNA more than you might otherwise.

Darrow is a fine protagonist. The world-building is ambitious. The action sequences are well-paced. None of it is bad — it just didn't grip me the way I expected it to.

I'll finish the trilogy. The ending leaves enough open threads that I'm curious where it goes, and I've heard the sequels take things in a different direction. But I won't be pressing this one into anyone's hands or telling them to drop everything and read it. If you go in with measured expectations, you'll probably have a good time.