Red Queen

✨📖 Book Review: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard👑⚡

What this book is about:
In a world divided by blood, the powerful Silver elite rule with supernatural abilities while the powerless Reds struggle to survive. Mare Barrow, a Red girl from the poor Stilts, accidentally discovers she has powers of her own, something that should be impossible. To keep her secret hidden, the Silvers force her into their dangerous royal world where rebellion, betrayals, secrets, and a messy love triangle wait around every corner. 🩸⚔️

My thoughts 💭
I finally decided to read Red Queen for two reasons:
1️⃣ It had been sitting on my shelf collecting dust long enough 😂
2️⃣ I kept seeing people compare it to the Powerless trilogy, with some show more even saying Powerless copied Red Queen.

Now having read Powerless, Red Queen, and at least the first Hunger Games book… I honestly think Red Queen feels way closer to Hunger Games than Powerless does 👀

The Queen gave me serious President Snow energy with her cold vindictiveness, and Mare? Listen… hand that girl a bow and arrow and she could absolutely pass for Katniss with extra lightning powers ⚡🏹

But here’s my take: every book is inspired by something. If you read enough fantasy, dystopian, or romance books, you will start seeing overlapping tropes and themes everywhere. We’ve got:
✨ rebellion against the elite
✨ class division
✨ powerless people vs the powerful
✨ political games
✨ love triangle drama
✨ betrayals and secret agendas

At the end of the day, each author still tells their own story and brings their own characters to life.

As for Red Queen itself… I didn’t hate it, but it was a slower read for me. The politics took center stage a lot, and the romance didn’t really hit the way I hoped it would. I also got frustrated with Mare because girl PLEASE stop trusting suspicious people so easily 😭 especially considering how she grew up.

That said, once the action finally picked up, I was invested. The betrayals were predictable for me pretty early on, but they were still executed well enough that I enjoyed seeing everything unfold. And the ending definitely did its job because now I want to know what happens next 👀📚

I also give the book credit for having solid writing and dialogue that never felt painfully dragged out, which is always a huge win for me.

⭐ Final Rating: 3/5 stars
Overall, Red Queen felt like a mix of The Hunger Games with fantasy and monarchy elements layered on top. It’s well written, the world has potential, and the action/betrayal moments were strong enough to keep me interested even through the slower pacing.

📚 Would I recommend it?
Yes… especially if you love:
⚔️ dystopian fantasy
👑 monarchy politics
🔥 rebellion stories
🩸 class conflict
💔 betrayals & shifting loyalties
👀 messy love triangle tension show less

Mare is a Red--a normal, unpowered laborer with little hope for anything other than dying as a pawn in the Silver's endless war. When a quirk of fate reveals that Mare impossibly has Silver-like powers, the king forces her into hiding in plain sight. Mare is betrothed to the youngest Silver prince and forced to pretend to be the long-lost last surviving daughter of a noble Silver family. Mare is finally in the position to do something to help her people, but who can she trust?

This was one of those books I couldn't put down. I enjoyed Mare as a character and loved the way Aveyard built her world. There are some familiar YA tropes in this book, but there was enough to keep me guessing. I knew Mare was being played, but I wasn't totally show more sure until the end who was behind the manipulation. There's action, intrigue, a little romance--it's an enjoyable, fun read. show less

It was engaging and plot twist-y and well-written, but for me it didn't really ring true. It's set in a world of massive, horrifying inequalities, but the handling of those inequalities, the relationship between the privileged and the marginalized, felt ham-handed and superficial. The main character is a member of the disenfranchised group, the Reds, but the narrative itself privileges the story of the privileged Silvers at almost every turn. The story constantly forces Mare to see and acknowledge the humanity of her oppressors; it grants minimal screen time to Red characters. In many ways, the Red characters operate as dei ex machina, swooping in to move the plot where it needs to go, but not made a part of the emotional journey. The show more drama, the pathos, the emotional heart of the story is saved for the Silvers.

The entire structure of the book reflects what I think is a very common idea in America: that the stories of oppressors are more interesting than the stories of the oppressed. This may be different in the next book; I don't know, and I'm not invested enough to find out. show less

I wanted to like this book, but it was just a little too much -- too much harping on betrayal (was it supposed to be a surprise?) too much angst, too much heroically trying to protect each other, too many strong statements on how it must be this way! No one will believe that I didn't have control over myself when I did x, even though the queen has the ability to make people do things with her mind! Perfectly fine, if you're looking for a mediocre YA book with plot holes you can drive a truck through. That's not really my cup of tea.

I was excited to read this book when it first came out, but as per usual it took me almost 10 years to get around to it... Shame, I know, but it was surprisingly worth the wait and I can see why it (and the subsequent novels) has gotten so much praise. Unlike most fantasy novels which come out these days the author has actually created a relatively unique world inhabited by two very different populations of people. I only say "relatively unique" because these is very little truely new in terms of literature or ideas, but she presents the conflict between the Reds and Silvers (as personified through her protagonist Mare Barrow) in an engaging manner and makes her characters realistic and relatable. Essentially we are given a rebellion show more story (with a dash of romance thrown in for good measure), which in most cases does not interest me in the lest due to its predictable nature and generally poor quality writing, but in some cases such as this the characters and setting are enough to carry the story along. Ave yard also doesn't get too acught up with explaining the entire backstory of the events, and lets them unfold naturally around the protagonist (we're learning right alongside her), so I expect that the following books in the series will allow us to delve deeper into the social constructs of Norta and allow the Red Guards' rebellion to have room to fully expand. show less

Stop me if you've heard this before.

So there's this girl who lives in this not-so-distant-but-kinda-distant dystopian future where humanity is divided between the have's and have-not's on kinda ridiculous grounds. Homegirl has a terrible name. Her family is basically destitute, so she has to resort to illegal activities to keep them alive -- illegal activities that just so happen to give her a very convenient and useful skill set. Despite taking place in the future, technology is pretty 21st century: television, cars, nonspecific flying vehicles, and cameras. Cameras everywhere. Just all over the place. Also, there's a rebellion that thinks she'd make a great public face for the revolt. And at one point, a dome gets struck by lightning show more and breaks apart. And people fight in arenas, sometimes to the death, while everyone watches.

No, this isn't Hunger Games. This is Red Queen. And it is horrible.

I'm trying to imagine the author pitching this: "So you know the Hunger Games series? Ok, so Hunger Games but with royalty. And instead of a love triangle, there's a love square. Isn't that even better?"

Good lord.

I will give Red Queen this. It was incredibly entertaining for the first 100 pages, much in the way terrible B movies are entertaining. Then it stopped being entertaining and was just bad. The last fifty pages was such a slog. The writing is horrible. The characters are awful. The whole thing feels very cheap. I keep imagining one of those super low-budget fantasy TV series where the royal court has ten people in it because they can't afford to hire more actors. Except this is a book, so there isn't a budget and therefore no excuse.

If you need me, I'll be pouring bleach in my ear in an attempt to wipe the memories of reading this book. show less

Summary: Everyone knows that there are two types of people in the world: Silvers, and Reds. Silvers, so named because of the color of their blood, are the ruling class, while the Reds are the common people, kept under tight control by the Silvers and their inborn superhuman abilities. Mare Barrow has grown up as a Red, not hoping for much from her future except to maybe avoid being conscripted into Norta's endless war that uses Reds as cannon fodder. But when she - and the entire Silver court - discover that she too has powers, her life changes dramatically. Now she's held close by the ruling royal family, engaged to their younger son, and forced to maintain the charade that she's actually a long-lost Silver who was brought up by a show more family of Reds. In reality, she's in constant danger - the king and queen can't let the secret of her Red Blood out, the Red rebellion wants to use her as a pawn, and she's surrounded by enemies who have been training with their powers all their lives, while she still struggles to control hers. She feels a connection with Cal, the heir, even though he is his father's son in many ways and is engaged to a member of the Silver nobility, and she slowly begins to trust both him and Maven, her fiancee, who secretly is in sympathy with the Red cause. But can Mare really trust anyone when she's caught in such a deadly game, and even a drop of her own blood could betray her?

Review: Red Queen is the latest in what seems like a recent flood of young adult dystopian novels. In some ways, it's very reminiscent of other works in the genre. I found it distinctly similar to Snow Like Ashes / Ice Like Fire in a lot of ways - a young woman who suddenly finds out she has powers (magic) she didn't know she had and is forced into a political quagmire that she is not particularly equipped to deal with, and must struggle to save her people, who have been enslaved by others her whole life. (It also probably didn't hurt this comparison that I listened to them both on audiobook only a few months apart, and the narrators sounded pretty similar as well.) There's also some obvious parallels to Mockingjay, Divergent, X-Men, etc.

But despite these similarities, I found Red Queen to be a lot more compelling and memorable than I usually expect from the YA dystopian genre. When I wasn't listening to the book, I was wanting to be listening, or at least thinking about the story in a corner of my mind. The details have stuck with me after I've finished it, and I'm really excited to see where the story goes next. I thought there was just the right amount of complexity to the backstory and the shifting allegiances and the political strategizing - enough to keep me interested, not so much that it gets cumbersome. There were parts of this story that I found completely predictable - for example, when Cal first turns up in disguise in the Red village, I was like "well obviously that's a Silver", because I've read a book before - but the twist at the end of the book totally surprised me, although in retrospect Aveyard had been planting clues all along. I like Mare a lot as a protagonist, although I did sigh a little when I thought that the story was heading into boring love-triangle-ville. (It winds up more complex than that by the end, thank goodness.) The worldbuilding was effective, although there's enough set up and hints about the past that I hope the explanations of "how things got to be this way" are coming in future volumes, and that they make some sense. (I'm looking at you, Allegiant.) Overall, I found this story very effective in all the ways that matter, and am excited that I don't have to wait too long for the next book! 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you like YA dystopian novels, this book is in many ways more of the same, but it's more of the same done really well, and so it's worth a read. show less