Sometimes, comparisons are inevitable. Sometimes, books are such a part of the zeitgeist, such a part of our common vocabulary, such a part of our society, that any later book that employs similar elements is going to, deliberately or not, hearken back to our shared reference point. It’s going to be a long time before someone can write a wizarding boarding school story without every potential reader thinking immediately of Harry Potter. Political allegories featuring animals always lead back to Orwell. And even though Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are very different, for a while, a discussion of the latter almost invariably involved mentioning the former. (Seriously, I read Battle Royale solely because I couldn’t escape the inescapable comparison.)
All I have to say about Red Queen, this month’s revolution read, is that it features an economically stratified society, a lower-class girl given an unusual opportunity to foment a revolution, and teens battling to the death in an arena, and you’ll start comparing Red Queen to The Hunger Games and, likely, Battle Royale. (I also understand that, if you’ve read Red Rising, you’ll be make some inexorable comparisons about that as well.) Which leads me to wonder: how long before writing about teens battling in an arena doesn’t cause the reader to think, immediately and irreversibly, of The Hunger Games?
Because, rightly or wrongly, for good or for ill, as I read Red Queen, I couldn’t stop comparing it to The Hunger Games. I expected similar plot twists, I contrasted the respective writing styles, I essentially used The Hunger Games as the reference point for everything that Victoria Aveyard accomplished – or didn’t – in her work. Fairly or unfairly.
And I bet you did – or will – too.
Red Queen features a land torn apart by class, where the silver-blooded rule and the red-blooded struggle to get by, laboring in factories, stealing from their own, and suffering as cannon-fodder for a century-old conflict with neighboring countries. Further, silver-blooded are gifted: flame-makers, water-wielders, healers, mind magicians – and as a brutally effective method of subjugation, they force the red-blooded to attend martial displays of their power.
Though a chance encounter, Mare – a red-blooded thief trying desperately to avoid military conscription – ends up in the royal arena during the Queenstrial: an opportunity for elite young ladies to demonstrate their powers in an attempt to gain the hand of one of the princes in marriage. In a deus ex machina that almost works, Mare discovers that she, though red-blooded, has powers of her own. Politically unable to kill her, the royal family instead reinvents her as a long-lost, silver-blooded girl and engages her to their younger son. Mare, now Mareena, has a deadly secret to hide in a deadly political world – one that she’s eager to overthrow to help the red-blooded.
Red Queen is, more than anything, visual. Aveyard has a film-writing degree, and it shows. Red Queen is crafted with to play, dramatically, in your head. From the vivid descriptions of Mare’s surroundings, to the endless instances of theatrical bleeding of silver or red, to not one hot prince, but two, and a hot fisher-boy besides, the book is born of the brain of an author who thinks visually. Aveyard’s ability to put pictures in your brain, using only words, is stunning.
And Red Queen is terrifically readable. It has a slow start: you don’t even get to the plot elements featured on the flap copy until page 53, which is about where I think you should be about through the flap copy. You could probably take 100 pages out of this book for a tighter, tenser reader experience. But Aveyard skillfully uses the cliffhanger chapter ending, the endless twists and turns of intrigue, and Mare’s wavering between arrogance and mistakes to create a book that pulls you along at a reasonably breakneck pace.
Less successful is the love…square(?) and the cliffhanger ending. I think we’re all about done with multiple love interests (though to Mare’s credit, despite all the kissing, she eventually says that she chooses no one – and I cheered). And I’m so over too-long, cliffhanger-ending first-books-as-part-of-series that I might start selecting books based on whether they’re standalones. Publishers, I see what you’re doing, and it’s not always helping your authors gain readership. Stop it.
If I’m being honest, I suspect that I would have liked this book much more had either I never read The Hunger Games or used many fewer of the same elements. I just couldn’t stop comparing Red Queen to Suzanne Collins’s work, and The Hunger Games was tighter, with a more developed world, and higher stakes. Which isn’t to say that Red Queen is a bad book, because it’s actually a pretty good book; it’s just not The Hunger Games, and the similar elements make it near-impossible to read without never-ending comparisons.
All I have to say about Red Queen, this month’s revolution read, is that it features an economically stratified society, a lower-class girl given an unusual opportunity to foment a revolution, and teens battling to the death in an arena, and you’ll start comparing Red Queen to The Hunger Games and, likely, Battle Royale. (I also understand that, if you’ve read Red Rising, you’ll be make some inexorable comparisons about that as well.) Which leads me to wonder: how long before writing about teens battling in an arena doesn’t cause the reader to think, immediately and irreversibly, of The Hunger Games?
Because, rightly or wrongly, for good or for ill, as I read Red Queen, I couldn’t stop comparing it to The Hunger Games. I expected similar plot twists, I contrasted the respective writing styles, I essentially used The Hunger Games as the reference point for everything that Victoria Aveyard accomplished – or didn’t – in her work. Fairly or unfairly.
And I bet you did – or will – too.
Red Queen features a land torn apart by class, where the silver-blooded rule and the red-blooded struggle to get by, laboring in factories, stealing from their own, and suffering as cannon-fodder for a century-old conflict with neighboring countries. Further, silver-blooded are gifted: flame-makers, water-wielders, healers, mind magicians – and as a brutally effective method of subjugation, they force the red-blooded to attend martial displays of their power.
Though a chance encounter, Mare – a red-blooded thief trying desperately to avoid military conscription – ends up in the royal arena during the Queenstrial: an opportunity for elite young ladies to demonstrate their powers in an attempt to gain the hand of one of the princes in marriage. In a deus ex machina that almost works, Mare discovers that she, though red-blooded, has powers of her own. Politically unable to kill her, the royal family instead reinvents her as a long-lost, silver-blooded girl and engages her to their younger son. Mare, now Mareena, has a deadly secret to hide in a deadly political world – one that she’s eager to overthrow to help the red-blooded.
Red Queen is, more than anything, visual. Aveyard has a film-writing degree, and it shows. Red Queen is crafted with to play, dramatically, in your head. From the vivid descriptions of Mare’s surroundings, to the endless instances of theatrical bleeding of silver or red, to not one hot prince, but two, and a hot fisher-boy besides, the book is born of the brain of an author who thinks visually. Aveyard’s ability to put pictures in your brain, using only words, is stunning.
And Red Queen is terrifically readable. It has a slow start: you don’t even get to the plot elements featured on the flap copy until page 53, which is about where I think you should be about through the flap copy. You could probably take 100 pages out of this book for a tighter, tenser reader experience. But Aveyard skillfully uses the cliffhanger chapter ending, the endless twists and turns of intrigue, and Mare’s wavering between arrogance and mistakes to create a book that pulls you along at a reasonably breakneck pace.
Less successful is the love…square(?) and the cliffhanger ending. I think we’re all about done with multiple love interests (though to Mare’s credit, despite all the kissing, she eventually says that she chooses no one – and I cheered). And I’m so over too-long, cliffhanger-ending first-books-as-part-of-series that I might start selecting books based on whether they’re standalones. Publishers, I see what you’re doing, and it’s not always helping your authors gain readership. Stop it.
If I’m being honest, I suspect that I would have liked this book much more had either I never read The Hunger Games or used many fewer of the same elements. I just couldn’t stop comparing Red Queen to Suzanne Collins’s work, and The Hunger Games was tighter, with a more developed world, and higher stakes. Which isn’t to say that Red Queen is a bad book, because it’s actually a pretty good book; it’s just not The Hunger Games, and the similar elements make it near-impossible to read without never-ending comparisons.
Amy