Time for a book review!
The premise: In an indeterminate point in the future, the world is divided by the color of your blood: Reds and Silvers. Powerful blood flows in the veins of Silvers, giving them abilities not granted to the Reds. The Silvers live like gods, while lowly Reds are commoners.
In a small Red village lives Mare Barrow. She earns money and food for her family by being quite a prolific thief, while her sister Gisa does honorable work as an embroiderer. But when a simple plan to save Mare’s friend from being drafted into the army (a veritable death sentence for a Red) goes awry, Mare finds herself working as a servant in a Silver palace.
Here, she discovers that she has an ability of her own, deadly and very different from anything the Silvers have ever seen. Fearful of what her powers could mean, as the country balances carefully on the knife of war, the Silver royals declare her a long-lost princess and betroth her to a Silver prince, hoping to keep her under their thumb until they figure out what she is.
This summary, to me, fails to capture the best things about this book. I loved it. I’m very supportive of authors taking the current dystopic trend and running with it, which Victoria Aveyard has done beautifully here. The YA dystopia movement really kicked off with The Hunger Games and plenty of authors have written their own version, including things like The 100 (The Hunger Games meets Ender’s Game), Shatter Me (The Hunger Games meets the X-Men), and Selection (Hunger Games meets The Princess and the Pea). But Red Queen is one of the few (only? I don’t like absolutes) books I’ve seen that so seamlessly blends dystopia with medieval royalty, so that you hardly notice the dystopia aspect but it bursts in at just the right times.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I got a bit burned out on dystopia books in the last couple years. I read too many of them at once and got tired of the concept. Many were great books (Unwind, Delirium, Matched, Divergent, Uglies, Incarceron, Glitch, Under the Never Sky, wow what is it with one-word titles?) and I would absolutely recommend them, but I overdosed.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of dystopia. I think it’s a great genre, I enjoy it immensely, and with that in mind I give myself permission to critique the heck out of it. The trouble with it at this point is that it has become formulaic.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss is an unknown citizen before she is picked at random to be placed in an arena on national TV, where she can defy the enemy in public. In Divergent, Tris is an unknown citizen before it is discovered that her brain is structured differently from everyone else’s and because of this she can mess with the enemy’s tech. Even in futuristic fiction, we haven’t outgrown the Chosen One trope. Whether they’re chosen because they’re BRAVER or STRONGER or JUST BLOODY LUCKY doesn’t matter, the end result is the same. They are chosen, they are different from everyone else, they tear down the government and change the world.
The other major problem with dystopias is the number of Strong Female Characters who don’t actually do anything. They are so guns-blazingly awesome that they don’t need to do anything in order to earn the respect of their fellow characters. You take the word of their compatriots that they are excellent leaders, highly skilled at whatever their thing is, and “really such a sweetheart on the inside.” In my opinion, Red Queen subverts this one nicely by having Mare take initiative and make her own decisions, but she’s one of the first.
I have read (and written) a lot of dystopia and I hope that we can turn it around. I want more creative worlds, not just the same old “everyone’s in poverty and it’s the government’s fault” (wait that’s real life), I want more realistic female characters who get shit done, I want a new plot formula that doesn’t revolve around a Chosen One. This genre is so new, I believe there is still time to save it.
Back to Red Queen: it totally blew me away. It was dystopic without being in-your-face about it (lookin’ at you, Matched), it had twisty royal politics made even more high-stakes by the fact that every royal has the equivalent of superpowers passed down through their family tree, it had a fantastic female protagonist who EXISTS WITHOUT A LOVE INTEREST CAN YOU BELIEVE IT. That is pretty much unheard of now, female characters who stand on their own without a male partner. In fact, at one point someone asks her which of two boys she’s going to choose and her response is, “I choose me.” Kickass.
From a writer’s perspective, it was well-paced and the character development had realistic timing (Mare wasn’t immediately proficient in her power after discovering she had it, et cetera). And the best part (without spoiling anything) is the completely unexpected twist at the end. I love an author who can pull off a good twist without it seeming campy.
I’m giving four and a half stars to Victoria Aveyard and her Silver-blooded royals.
(Red Queen is the first in what I believe is going to be a trilogy. The second book, Glass Sword, comes out in February)
Careful Wordsmith 