Red Rising Review
The Red Rising trilogy starts slow but delivers one of the best payoffs in recent sci-fi.
Rating: 7/10 (book one) — 9/10 (books two and three)
I almost didn’t finish book one. I’m glad I did.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown starts as YA dystopian fiction — a miner’s son discovers he’s actually a slave caste in a color-coded society and decides to fight back. Think Hunger Games if Katniss went to a fancy school and punched more people. It’s fine. It’s competent. It doesn’t hint at what’s coming.
Book One: Slow Burn
The first hundred pages are genuinely rough. The protagonist, Darrow, has a dead wife and a chip on his shoulder the size of a small moon. The society-building is heavy-handed. The YA beats are all there — the mentors, the testing arc, the love triangle setup.
But Brown is doing something underneath all that. He’s building a world with real rules. The color system isn’t just set dressing — it’s load-bearing. Every social dynamic, every betrayal, every alliance later in the series connects back to those rules. The slow setup pays off, but you have to trust it.
By the end of book one I was interested. Not obsessed, but interested enough to pick up the next one.
Book Two: Everything Changes
Golden Son is where the series becomes something else entirely.
The story expands from one contest to an interplanetary political war. The moral stakes get complicated — Darrow does things that aren’t heroic, makes decisions that cost people he cares about, and the book doesn’t look away from that. The characters who felt like archetypes in book one become actual people here.
There’s a scene toward the end of Golden Son that genuinely shocked me. I won’t spoil it, but I put the book down for a minute afterward.
Book Three: The Payoff
Morning Star delivers. Big, messy, emotionally exhausting in the best way. The scale of the conflict feels earned because you’ve watched it build across two books. Characters who’ve been in the background get their moments. The ending is satisfying without being neat.
The pacing in book three is relentless — Brown barely lets you breathe. A few plot threads get resolved a bit too conveniently, but by the time you’re that deep in, you don’t really care.
The Verdict
If someone told me about this series starting with book three, I would’ve started there and been lost. The journey is the point. You need the slow first book to feel what the later books are paying off.
Don’t let the slow start fool you. Books two and three are spectacular — and Golden Son specifically is one of the best middle entries in a trilogy I’ve read.