Red Queen

by Victoria Aveyard

Series: Red Queen

Rating: 4 stars

This certainly wasn’t the most original thing I’ve ever read, but I enjoyed it anyways.
Mare (okay, what’s with that name? She. Is. Not. A. Horse. Like, wut?) lives in a world where if you have red blood, you’re basically a slave, and the people with silver blood are royalty and nobles and wealthy merchants, and have magical* (I think it’s magic anyway) powers. Only Mare is a Red, and has powers. So she ends up engaged to a Silver prince, forced to disguise herself as a long lost Silver… I read this on the back, and was like, why didn’t they just kill her, it would be simpler. It did make sense though, once I actually read the book.

*also I now really want to know (like, it just occurred to me as I wrote this post), what happens if a Red and a Silver have a child? Would they have powers? What colour would their blood be? It’s got to have happened at some point, I WANT TO KNOW!

Setting

I wasn’t impressed by the world building. It was sort of nonexistent.
I have no idea what their world looks like. I can’t tell if they live in a rainforest of plains (or something else entirely). I don’t even know what their country is called! Also there’s two big cities, and I can’t tell them apart at all. Honestly I don’t know if one of them is even a city, it might just be a castle. In the middle of nowhere… okay I think it’s a city. Maybe.*

The culture (totally not the right word but whatever, it’s what I’m using), was developed slightly better, but only slightly.
Like, I know that the Silvers have more privileges than the Reds, and that Reds are little more than slaves. I know that Silvers have powers, and like silk. I know that Reds have to join the army if they don’t have a job. But that doesn’t add up to an interesting culture. I wanted more.

*Okay, I honestly have no idea.

Plot

The plot was interesting, and I really wanted to know what happened.
It was, however, somewhat slow, and political. I like that, but I know not everybody does. For the most part, I liked the plot, but it had some problems, I’m pretty sure there was some plot holes (although I promptly forgot what they were), and a bunch of characters “died” and then were magically alive in the last chapter. It. Didn’t. Make. Sense. How are they alive? I want explanations. They only explained how one of them survived. Also SO many people died* and ALL the characters you’d actually met survived. How? It didn’t make sense. Urghhhh!!!!!**

Also there was too much betrayal. I think I’ve just read too many books with a big betrayal lately. Waaayyy too many. In which one of my favourite characters betrays everyone majorly, and it’s like, “well, I don’t like you anymore”

*I think. Possibly nobody died, and I just made that up

**If you’re going to do something unrealistic, can’t you at least give it some explanation?

Characters

For me characters are the most important part of a book, and I think they’re most of the reason I liked this book.
I liked Mare* from early on. Basically from the moment she made a sarcastic remark about how creatively named her village was (it was called Stilts, after the stilts on all the houses). It was the sort of thing I would say, and that made me happy, so from then on I liked her.

I liked the other characters too, I quite liked Lukas, and I was inexplicably attached to Mare’s brother Shade, seeing as he wasn’t really ever in the book. I also loved her younger sister Gisa,** she was really sweet, and I felt so bad for her.

I really liked Kilorn (Mare’s friend) in the beginning, but he got sort of bitter and angry later on.
There was also the princes, Cal and Maven, I went back and forth between whether I liked them or not. I’m still not entirely sure.

*I like her. I do not like her name.

**I think that was her name, but I’m not quite sure… it might have been Gina, or Gissa, or something else entirely.

Over All

I liked this book, I’m glad I read it, and I’d like to finish the series. It’s not one of my favourite books ever, and it had some flaws, but I think it was well written, and worth a read.

Have you read Red Queen? (that sounds silly when you say it out loud) Are you going to? Do you think Mare is a silly name? Do you like books with shocking betrayals?