/lit/ - Literature

>>22888465
Golden Son, Red Rising Saga #2 - Pierce Brown (2015)

Golden Son is better in every way than Red Rising, which is what everyone has told me. Brown has clearly improved and learned a lot. This time it's space opera and while it doesn't focus on being military science fiction, it's certainly present. One of the biggest differences is how much more expansive it is and how much it's willing to do. I wasn't able to take the first book seriously, and I still can't with this one, but I can appreciate what it's doing. This is exceedingly commercial genre fiction done well. It knows what it is, focuses on that, and doesn't pretend otherwise.

Darrow remains insufferable, though I have to wonder how much that's because it's in first person. I get the feeling that for many others what I find insufferable may be relatable or even appealing. My main problem is that he's a character rather than a person. What I mean by that is that he's whatever the current scene requires him to be regardless of any other consideration. The same goes for every other aspect of the novel, but the weaknesses in characterization are the most readily apparent and the hardest to overlook for me. This book is among those that has that greatest gap between what I think about the protagonist and the book overall. Several other characters are better, but it wouldn't be the same story if Darrow weren't the protagonist.

This is a strange book in that it feels entirely crafted to reader considerations, yet still works well. It's not organic at all in the way it plays with reader expectations, however it does know what those expectations are and what to do with them. It's all very calculated in its craft. I don't know how sustainable that is, as with anything that relies upon novelty, but it suffices in the short term. The question Brown seems to ask himself for every scene is "What would make this most entertaining for the reader?". So, if you're reading this for anything other than base entertainment, I think you're doing it wrong. That puts a hard cap on how highly I can think of it, but I consider that entirely separate from enjoyment, and not at all relevant for most.

Despite almost everything I saw about this book being much better, I still had considerable doubt, but I was wrong. Even so, I'm keeping my expectations in check. However, as I've written before, I'm not concerned with novelty most times. If someone writes a formula that I enjoy, I don't care if they do it over and over again, as long as I'm still enjoying it. That's not something I would want everyone else to do, but it's what I do. As I wrote, I can't take this book seriously, though I can appreciate it. I don't find it meaningful, but not everything has to be. Sometimes fun things are simply fun and don't need to be anything more than that. At the end I realized that I had laughed enough in joy and was amused enough by its ridiculousness to give it a 4 rather than a 3.5 rounded up.

Rating: 4/5