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.