Glass Sword

Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat. Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.

DNF 40%

After Red Queen left me equal parts disappointed (by the lack of originality) and incredulous (also at the lack of originality), I should have handed this series back to the person who passed it to me like some sort of ancient curse. However, needs must when you’re staying in a remote cabin with no wi-fi and five tv channels, so I decided to give book two a crack. Hey, it could only be up from the bottom, right?

Wrong.

Christ on a bike, where to start with this book? I – and I’m sure many others – noted the … *ahem* similarities to The Hunger Games in Red Queen. Perhaps I was just still in that mindset, but opening this book with our recently rescued heroine and the rebellion fleeing from the powers that be, complete with bomb-dropping fighter jets and a desperate flee through a city that was long thought abandoned due to nuclear radiation? Seriously!? Just like the fact there are only so many chords some songs are going to sound the same, I get that there only so many plot points and some books are going to have similar elements. But when there are so many scenes that feel like they were cut and pasted from one book to another I can’t get then get fully engaged with a story because half my mind is thinking about another one.

What I read of the plot of Glass Sword was all but non-existent. Mare and her allies search Norta etc for other so-called New Bloods. They find one, we get a brief intro of their powers like that god-awful scene in X-Men 3 where Mystique literally reads character bios to Magneto, then they move on while trying to avoid Maven’s forces. That … seemed to be it. Oh, aside from Mare’s constant sulking and brooding of course. And her painfully contrived insistence on referring to herself as the Lightning Girl every five seconds. If Red Queen’s drinking games – Hunger Games rip-offs and YA tropes – could have killed you through alcohol poisoning, just imagine taking a drink every time the words “Lightning Girl” cursed the pages.

As with Red Queen, this book may be derivative and predictable but it also incredibly well written. I don’t care for the story or the characters (in case my reviews didn’t make that clear!) but I’d be tempted to pick up something else written by this author because, if the plot was more original, I imagine she can tell one hell of a story.

Eventually though, when it became clear that all my issues with Red Queen were still present and correct in the sequel, I gave up and binned off books three and four. I don’t know why I expected this one to be any better than its predecessor, but I have no one to blame but myself for wasting my time on it.

 

Red Queen

This is a world divided by blood - red or silver. The Reds are commoners, ruled by a Silver elite in possession of god-like superpowers. And to Mare Barrow, a seventeen-year-old Red girl from the poverty-stricken Stilts, it seems like nothing will ever change. That is until she finds herself working in the Silver Palace. Here, surrounded by the people she hates the most, Mare discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy the balance of power. Fearful of Mare's potential, the Silvers hide her in plain view, declaring her a long-lost Silver princess, now engaged to a Silver prince. Despite knowing that one misstep would mean her death, Mare works silently to help the Red Guard, a militant resistance group, and bring down the Silver regime. But this is a world of betrayal and lies, and Mare has entered a dangerous dance - Reds against Silvers, prince against prince, and Mare against her own heart.

When my friend deposited this quadrilogy in my lap, declaring it utter trash but something I’d probably love, I was torn. On the one had; free books. On the other hand; what exactly was she saying about my tastes? I’ve heard plenty about the Red Queen series over the years (who in the YA blogging community hasn’t?) but had never got around to picking it up. Something about the blurbs always turned me off. They were too neat; hitting all the “bestseller” selling points and offering very little else. Still, free books are free books and I had a week’s trip to a remote Scottish island coming up, so I packed the books and dove in.

And was immediately glad I didn’t spend my hard-earned money on them.

I read somewhere that the author of Red Queen wanted to write “the next big YA series”. That to me is a pretty damning indictment of this book, and it shows on every page. There’s no heart, no passion in the story. Everything is cold, calculating and cynical. Everything YA trope is ticked off the list and every plot development can be seen coming a mile away because you’ve read it before in other (dare I say better?) books. You could play a YA trope bingo drinking game with this book, but you’d be dead from alcohol poisoning by the half way mark. I kid you not; you would actually die. The story itself is essentially The Hunger Games with X-Men powers. The first quarter or so of the book apes The Hunger Games so blatantly I’m amazed this was published without having some of the more glaringly obvious “similarities” edited out first. Surely I can't be the only one who felt this!?

My main issue with this book was the protagonist, Mare. Mare has it tough. She’s part of an oppressed underclass ruled by a rich and powerful city. A “capital”, if you will. Alongside her salt of the earth best friend and possible love interest, Gale Kilorn, she survives in her … let’s call it a district … by thieving and scavenging to feed her beloved family, especially her sheltered little sister. She dreams of running away to avoid what seems to be her inevitable, miserable end in life, but won’t abandon her family. After a few twists of fate, she ends up whisked away to the capital (with an "a"), a world of material excess, political intrigue and hot guys vying for her attention while she has to play up to the role created for her in order to save her skin and those of the people she loves. Oh, and then she becomes the face of an underground rebellion looking to use her as a pawn in their own machinations. 

Mare also complains. A lot. A secondary bingo drinking game, where you take a shot every time she sulks, whines or monologues about how unfair everything is, would see you dead from liver failure before you got through chapter three. Even when she’s been taken from her pitiful existence and taken to palace to be passed off as a long lost royal – even though this plan of action creates more problems for the evil king and queen than it solves – she doesn’t stop feeling sorry for herself. Sure, it’s not an ideal situation, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what she had going on before and puts her in a position to help a lot more people. If she quit feeling sorry for herself and chose to make the best of a situation, but that doesn’t appear to be her style.

In the desperation to make Mare the new Katniss, this book completely misses what made Katniss such a fantastic and relatable character in the first place. She wasn’t a unique snowflake who just needed to stumble ass-backwards into a situation where people would finally discover how special she was. She was just a normal girl who made rash decisions, and then had to live with the consequences of those decisions. Mare is not that. She’s the most special of all the superpowered people in this book, she just needed someone (a hot prince, of course) to discover just how incredible and special she is. Did I mention that she’s special? Everything she does is at the insistence or orders of other people. When she does finally make a decision off her own back by joining the rebellion, she makes a mistake so stupid I can’t believe it was passed off as a twist ending.

All the other characters are pretty standard across the board, with the two love triangle angles Cal and Maven coming off as bland at best and horribly calculated at worst. Cal in particular fell totally flat, with barely a defining characteristic to be found. His "romance" with Mare had absolutely zero heat, despite the obligatory learning to dance scene, and although his love/hate relationship wth brother Maven fared a little better, it was forced to take a backseat to the love triangle. Evangeline was your standard beautiful mean-girl who hated our protagonist because she was getting in her way of the men (apparently this is revealed not to be the case in later books, but I didn’t see much else here). The evil queen was evil. The puppet king was a puppet. The book was full of overly flowery prose that screams of an author writing her “profound” quotes first and then jamming them into the manuscript. If you’re not sure what lines are supposed to be quotable, don’t worry. They’ll often be italicised, lest we readers not know what to add to the Goodreads quotes section.

I give this book two stars instead of one because it was a very well written story and it's obvious that Victoria Aveyard is one hell of an author. Structure, pacing, writing style, all were top notch. Contrary to my friend's warning this book may be many things but it is not trash. If I felt like this author was telling her own story, writing from the heart, I probably would be giving this book raves. However the whole thing felt like a calculated exercise in producing a bestseller. If someone programmed a robot to write “the next big YA series”, Red Queen would be what it spat out. And, fair play, it was a success in that respect. But strip away the hype and the awards and you’re left with a basic book, and not a very original one at that.