Has anyone read any of the Red Rising books? I just ordered it on a whim because I heard someone talking about it.
I started the first one and put it down. I wasn't in the mood/it wasn't my style - something in between those two. I'd guess I'm an outlier, because a ton of people like it, and there wasn't anything obviously "bad" about it that I encountered.
I started the first book yesterday, I'm about halfway through now, and I'm really not enjoying it very much. It doesn't help that I typically don't enjoy books in first person, anyway, but it's just such a mishmash of so much things we've already seen elsewhere. Between Harry Potter, The Hunger Games/Battle Royale, Ender's Game, Divergent, or even older stuff like The White Mountains. So far there's been several twists and they were all pretty predictable, or at the very least not very surprising.
It's not awful, but it's just very blah. If it was a meal, it would be buttered noodles. Decent on it's own, but it's been done before. The prose is fine, I guess, although the author using the phrase "if 'a' is 'b', then 'x' is 'y" twice within about three chapters, just filling in different words for the variables. He also fell into the annoying habit of using capitalized in-universe lingo to show off how Cool and Unique his world is. Every person is assigned to a certain caste based on their birth and there is alllll sorts of eugenics going on there (similar to Brave New World, sort of), and every caste is assigned a Color. The Golds are the aristocrats and leaders, Tin serve as police, Obsidian are military, Red are the miners (and so blatantly Irish it's nearly offensive, what with their love of drinkin and dancin and singin, all they want to do is work hard and go home to their families, but they neglected and misled by the
English Golds). You also have stuff like the Conquering when the colonies on the Moon rebelled and took control of the solar system. It's just so Old and Tired and I am very much Over It.
There's also a good bit of rape so far in the middle third, so that's fun. I'll probably finish it, but unless it gets drastically better over the last half, I won't bother reading the rest of the trilogy.