Red Rising grumping, continued

Style

The style is a lot here, and I don't think it's doing the book any favors. Sentences are short. Fragmented. Deep in the head of the teenage protagonist. Maybe it's supposed to be gritty. Instead, it's choppy. Cheesy.

The book's newTechnology comboWord parade of shinyThings is exhausting: clawDrills, headTalks, godTrees, ionBlades, ghostCloaks, gravBoots, pulseShields, and recoilArmor. Occasionally, we also get PascalCase HellDivers, SchoolHouses, and ArchGovernors. Even more rarely also we get lowercase combo words like duroglass, durobags, and synthleather. (Pick one! Or zero!!)

I sometimes give Brandon Sanderson a hard time for writing systems and worlds that are so unambiguous that you could pin their corpse to a wiki. But, this book is more like a Calvinball match, where ideas are forgotten with less warning than with which they are introduced. To the book's credit, it can get minor points for properly foreshadowing the plot-critical gravBoots, but I will side-eye the rest. It's not that I don't understand their obvious function from the word; it's more that I don't understand how they fit into the worldbuilding or their purpose for existing at all. (And that also, from a writing perspective, I don't find these neologisms effective, especially when there's so many of them that none of them feel special.)

An good example of this is that in exactly three places in the book, Darrow comments on Golds talking in "highLingo" vs "midLingo". The first time it comes up, it's new to the reader, having not even been mentioned during the long training montage sequence of Darrow learning to be a Gold. Worse, there's no difference between these two modes of speaking on the page, and so it feels all tell and no show. A missed opportunity for linguistic worldbuilding.

In the diction department, there's quite a bit of homophobic and misogynistic insults. There's also some awkward turns of phrase, like "arrogants" as a noun (or a typo) and "Novas rejoins his thirty heavy horse."

Fridges

"If you led the others to freedom. The things you could do, Darrow. The things you could make happen. [...] It chills me. You have been given so, so much, but you set your sights so low."

The most egregious plot detail for me is that early on in chapter three, Darrow's wife Eo tries to talk Darrow into rebellion with a long corny speech. She is then immediately fridged in the very next chapter, and her tragic death is what (theoretically) motivates Darrow, who was previously uninterested in revolution. When she gave this speech, I wrote in my notes, "Oh, she's really not living for more than a couple more chapters, is she." grimacing emoji

Unfortunately, it's very unclear what the specifics of her politics are or what she's urging Darrow to do. She says: "live for more" and "break the chains". But what do any of these things actually mean in general, or even just to Darrow? If Darrow had gone to the Institute with a clear vision from Eo, maybe this would have felt more impactful, but mostly her role is to make him feel sad and angry.

Pacing

There are a number of places in the book where there's a a critical moment that is over in a sentence or two. There's tension buildup and pre-worry about an event, and then the event itself is anticlimactic.

This happens all over the place. The duel with Cassius, who feels betrayed after one of Darrow's long-held secrets comes out. The fight with Mercury. The final moment where Darrow worries that Mustang is betraying him for secret reasons. Even the ending ceremony is merely "ope, I'll pin a badge on you for winning, guess we're done here". (Honestly, it's not even precise what "winning" truly even means in this competition. The rules are made up and the points don't matter.)

At least the Hunger Games knew how to put on a show.

Miscellaneous Petty Complaints

Here's a list of quibbles I had that while reading that probably won't make sense unless you're read the book.

Plot things:

• The first chapter transitions directly from "oh these grumpy elders don't think we'll ever make quota to win the laurel this quarter" to chapter two "jk the laurel ceremony is literally tonight and we know we've definitely won for sure" with zero time passing in between.
• Eo brings Darrow to a secret forest with a night sky, and yet somehow the daytime blue sky in the city that Dancer brings him to later is new and surprising and reveals the "Mars is actually terraformed with breathable air" lie underlying all of Red society? Was this an inside forest? Exactly what about a night time forest does not say "terraforming"?
• I'll just accept that Mars has been magically terraformed here and handwave past its lack of magnetosphere and the presence of enough water to have blizzards.
• But what is going on with Mars gravity? The book explicitly uses the word ".37grav" but it doesn't seem to remember this most of the time. How are horses running normally in Mars gravity? Are the castles much taller to avoid somebody leaping up into them? So many questions.
• Applicants to the Institute have negative scores by their name when they are sitting down at the first table after the draft. This score never comes up again? Only the alternative scoring bars towards being Primus? It's also weird that these virtual Primus bar scores only get mentioned every once in a while, but yet everybody knows about them? Are they always visible?
• Darrow holds onto the red sweatband (or "sweat band", spelled both ways) during the Passage abduction, which is then not mentioned for most of the book; then he uses it to wipe the sweat off like 90% of the way through the book when he confronts Jupiter. Why would nobody have commented on this? What sort of Gold would wear a red-colored band? Where has he kept this the whole time???
• Darrow takes Eo's wedding band (of silk and hair) with him to the Institute, wears it on his finger, and nobody asks about this? It's obvious as a wedding band to Dancer who calls it queer, but maybe that's just because Dancer is also a Red. There's no indication of how this fits into his fake family story. He certainly is still wearing it during the Julian fight, and then it's never mentioned again?
• Exam score wise, everybody is a "lowDraft" or a "midDraft" or a "highDraft"; but how does Darrow know mid-combat that he is kneeing a highDraft in the face?
• It's hard to believe that "bloodydamn" would give away a Red, especially with the worldbuilding detail that people go "slumming" in lower colors, such that there would socially probably be some social cachet in appropriating the lingo of other colors; also, wouldn't literally knowing and singing all of the lyrics to a forbidden song when you have a recording ring on your finger be slightly more damning?
• Why are all of the proctors named Roman gods like Apollo, Venus, Minerva leading houses of their own name, but then we've also got Fitchner (leading House Mars)?
• It's funny to read Alix Harrow's The Everlasting worrying about accurately portraying the needs of taking care of a singular horse, and these warbands of starving children just acquire (and lose) dozens of horses constantly? Who is taking care of them, let alone feeding them?