That is what every man must tell himself in war. That there will be an end, and when it is done, enough of himself will remain.
Iron Gold
by Pierce Brown
Genre: YA Sci-Fi
Rant Review
This book starts the next chapter in the Red Rising series. We're ten years on from Morning Star, deep in an endless war, and this time we're not just following Darrow's story. Here, Pierce Brown explores what happened to Lysander the boy, to a Red after she's pulled out the mines, and a soldier disillusioned with The Rising.
While I appreciated the necessity to explore these different aspects of the war and could see why each of these new POVs had been picked, I hated all of them.
I liked that Lysander's POV takes us to The Rim, but I wish we'd been following one of the Raa characters. Lysander is predictably whiney, full of contradictions and I could find nothing to admire about him. He claims to care about the LowColours but he's actively seeking to return the world back to where they're oppressed by people like him again. In the same breath he calls his grandmother a tyrant, he says she gave peace to the worlds. You aren't living in peace if you're a slave. And then he's constantly admitting that "Cassius was right. Again." because, yeah, Cassius is often right about strategy, has better political understanding and a way more consistent moral compass than Lysander. Yet Lysander is so sure that Cassius is wrong about Darrow and The Rising. It's pig-headed ignorance, with an added bonus of lovesick puppy for Seraphina that does nothing for Lysander's credibility. His viewpoint is also often written as an outsider looking in and this just further disconnects him from his own story.
Lyria is also one for contradicting herself. In the same page she'll claim the Sovereign can't possible understand her suffering, one simple action will change her mind and she'll rethink everything she ever thought about the Sovereign. Yes, she's a child and learning about the world, but she zigzags so much and her actions often don't make sense. When she saves a solider at the beginning of her story, she does so by leaving her blind nephew and risking her life for the stranger. It's painted as a heroic act, as many of her actions are, but it doesn't read as a natural thing for her to do. More like she has to because she's a main character now so she's got to prove her bravery to the reader. And I hated how she thought about things. Like when she said Darrow isn't a Red when we as the reader know how much he's suffered through, or wanting to go back to the mines when the reason she's hated is because Gamma's literally had it easier in the mines compared to the other Reds, and blaming the people who freed her for the actions of The Red Hand... Obviously she's suffered a lot and her tragic moments are really well written and important to the series overall, but her viewpoint lacks nuance because she's a child with a very black and white way of seeing things and this can be really grating to read.
Ephraim's POV gives us heist action, showing the underworld's actions during the war and a more cynical viewpoint. It had potential for being exciting and providing the series with a beloved anti-hero. And maybe it does for other readers but I skimmed these chapters the most. So many of the conversations were unnecessarily long-winded, as was the set-up for action and the chunks of world-building. I really liked Volga's character but Ephraim was just a depressing man making bad choices over and over again and I felt nothing for any of his other crew members.
Darrow's POV was by far the best to read for me personally. The turn his character arc takes is interesting and because I'm already so invested in him as a character and the people he surrounds himself with, I naturally found his chapters more compelling. But even despite this, there's something so deeply tragic and a turnoff really to this new series that Darrow still has so much more suffering to go through. His happy ending from Morning Star is robbed from us in Iron Gold. I'm grateful that Darrow is a POV character in this book considering I hated the other POVs, but it comes at a high cost.
I love the complexity of this series. I think Pierce Brown is an absolute master at weaving emotion into political stratagem and giving his characters gut-wrenching conflict. There are some truly epic moments in this book, but it overall fell a little flat to me because I really didn't enjoy the new POV characters.
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