The Hunger Games on Mars.
That basically sums up this book by Pierce Brown, but not really. I had a hard time putting my finger on why I didn’t like this book, because although The Hunger Games wasn’t my favorite book, I did enjoy it enough to read all three books and watch all four movies.
While there are more books in this series, I’m calling it quits at one because I have no interest in spending more time in this world.
I was trying to figure out why that was, because the book is well written, well structured, and it has a story I’ve enjoyed before. So why didn’t I enjoy it this time?
The concept of this book is that there are classes based on color. Darrow, our main character, is a “Red,” which is at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
His job, as far as he knows, is to terraform Mars. It’s dirty, dangerous work that involves a lot of mining with heavy machinery, and the minute they step out of place, they get publicly executed. Even singing and dancing is considered a capital offense, and they’re deprived of food almost to the point of starvation. But they’re told their sacrifice is for the benefit of future generations who will get to live on a terraformed Mars.
The only problem is that Mars was terraformed ages ago. The upper classes keep the Reds underground (literally and figuratively) to keep them mining materials to be used by those already enjoying the benefits of a terraformed Mars.
But even that isn’t enough to convince Darrow to take up arms in the rebellion.
It isn’t until his wife sacrifices herself as a martyr to the cause that he decides things have to change.
The rebellion decides they’re going to sneak him into the school for “Golds,” the elites of this society. That means they have to make him physically look like a Gold, which requires all kinds of surgery, training on how to talk like a Gold, fight like a Gold, etc. So he goes through months of training, which probably still wouldn’t be enough to fool anyone, but it works because it’s a book. Also because, let’s be honest, people see what they expect to see. And when they expect to see a Gold, that’s what they see.
It turns out this “school” is super violent. It starts by taking students from their bed in the middle of the night and placing them in a room with one other student. They have no clothes and no weapons, and only one student can leave, and they can’t leave until the other student is dead. Darrow is forced to use his bare hands to kill a boy he has already started to like in order to get closer to his goal.
Now that half the class is dead and the other half has been “blooded,” they’re ready for the rest of their training, which involves getting dropped in the middle of nowhere on terraformed Mars with no supplies.
It turns out there are supplies hidden in the landscape, and castles, but also wolf packs, not to mention the gangs of other students trying to kill them. They’re sorted into houses, and each house works together to defeat all the other houses.
And the Hunger Games begin.
Someone in my book club called it a “boy book” and that’s when it hit me why I didn’t like it. It’s very violent, and the main character’s entire motivation is to get revenge for his dead wife.
The Hunger Games did a better job of balancing the violence with moments that were emotional and sweet. Whereas Katniss is fighting to protect the ones she loves, Darrow has joined a cause he only joined because his wife died for it.
Honestly, that’s kinda where the book lost me. As soon as I realized his wife was getting fridged, I realized this book wasn’t for me.
To be fair, his wife chooses to make herself a martyr for the cause, so it’s not entirely fair to say she’s at the mercy of a male-dominated story because she knowingly chooses her own death. At the same time, her death is still used as the motivation for everything Darrow does for the rest of the book, and I especially got tired of him going on and on about his perfect wife and her tragic death.
I didn’t have high hopes for the portrayal of female characters after that, but I actually liked the female characters that came later in the book. They were all badasses who murdered at least one person, one girl turned out to be the villain, which was very predictable, but I liked it anyway. And another ended up being a love interest for Darrow, which I found believable.
My problem is not that the female characters were underdeveloped. It’s that all the characters were underdeveloped.
Darrow’s entire motivation is revenge.
Because the book is told from his perspective, we don’t get to see the motivations of other characters, but they’re all pretty two dimensional. The villains are pure evil and the people who die tragically are portrayed as too good for this world.
The problem is there isn’t enough interaction between characters to make me feel anything when someone dies.
So, that’s my big complaint about this book. Lack of character development, and there’s no arc for the main character. He joins the rebellion after his wife dies and maintains a single-minded focus on bringing down the society that killed her, and that’s not as interesting as Brown thinks it is.