Title: Red Queen (Red Queen #1)
Author: Victoria Aveyard
Date Read: 23 March 2016
Published: February 10 2015 @ HarperTeen
Genre: YA Dystopian
Rating: ⭐⭐½
The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.
Victoria Aveyard's Red Queen, one of the most popular YA series in recent years, is the story of Mare Barrow, a red-blooded thief in a world ruled by silver-blooded super humans, who use their abilities to savagely control the populace. However, after a series of events lead Mare to the palace where the king and his family hold court, she discovers that she too has an ability, becoming the first Red Blood in history known to exhibit a silver-blooded power. Because of this, she is thrust into the court politics that cripple her people, and she must choose between her own survival and a budding romance with the prince, and the need to shift the balance of power in her kingdom.
Knowing the number of people who have echoed this exact same sentiment, I totally get the irony of calling Victoria Aveyard's "Red Queen" unoriginal. But here's the thing: it is. Red Queen is the culmination of recycled storylines that publishers seem to want to push down young adults' throats, and frankly, an attempt to cash in on Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games' success in both print and box office sales. There were several scenes while reading this story that felt like they were literally ripped out of the Hunger Games series with only slight changes in setting and character names. I also never read Divergent by Veronica Roth, but I assume the same can be said.
Let's talk tropes:
- An unbalanced society broken up into two classes of haves and have-nots
- An insta-lovey love triangle
- An underground rebellion with a snappy catch phrase and a strong female leader
- A main character who ~~doesn't realize she's extraordinary~~
- A little sister at home who needs to be protected
I could go on but I won't.
All of this isn't to say, necessarily, that this novel is bad. Only to say that I think that this novel was created less to be read and more to be marketed. Complete with the catch phrase ("Rise, red as the dawn"... sounds a bit like "If we burn, you burn with us," huh?) and flag emblem to take the place of the Mockingjay pin, it's really no surprise that this was snapped up to become a film very shortly after its release. I would probably argue that it was designed to be this way.
As far as the actual content and writing of the story, I'd call it a mixed bag. Aveyard's pacing is really tight and flows well, but beyond the class divide and a vague reference to a rival kingdom at war, there was basically no world-building to speak of. And to be honest, most of the conflicts in this novel felt really forced. Basically, nearly every problem that arises in Red Queen is a result of its protagonist, Mare, being too stupid to live. Which, to her credit, Mare does try to tell the audience that she's stupid: she says "I couldn't comprehend ______" or "it was more than I could comprehend" a nauseating number of times. Still, she made stupid decisions on a whim and decided for some insane reason that she cared enough about Cal and Maven to figure them into her plans to overthrow the silvers, despite the fact that she's basically their captive, and she's basically known both of them for about 2.5 seconds.
Cal, however, the eldest son and heir to the king, did have a really interesting story arc, struggling between the desire to do the right thing and the training he's received to be a compliant soldier. His inclusion was probably the only part of the story that I really enjoyed. I'm not even going to touch on Maven because he's more or less not worth my breath (or... key strokes, I guess?) and also, spoilers.
Was it a somewhat fun, trope-filled romp through an underdeveloped world? Sure. Was it enough to continue on to the next book in the series? Maybe. Probably not.
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