"Golden Son"

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

Pages: 443 Genre: sci-fi, fantasy

Rating: 1 Star

Kindle Highlights

Spoilers for Red Rising

Now integrated into Gold Society, Darrow, secretly a Red, is faced with how to move forward. He was pulled into the world by the Sons of Ares, a resistance group set on overthrowing the Gold Reign, but hasn't heard from them since. Now, he has to find his own path forward with everything he's learned.

You know, writing a synopsis for this book was hard. The "description" on Goodreads is almost identical to Book 1 and really doesn't tell you anything about the plot. Spoiler! It's because there's no real story to summarize.

Honestly, I've never been so excited to finish a book. I found Golden Son to be boring and confusing, and I'm so glad to not have to read any more of these books ever again.

There's not a real story arc. What is the narrative that pulls us through the whole thing? It felt like a 24/7 livestream instead of a contained book. Plus, a lot of the conflict came from Darrow's decision to tell us things instead of actual plot points. Conflict happened because things needed to happen. Nothing about Darrow felt consistent, so he would either be brilliant or clueless depending on what the narrative needs, and he'd only clue us in half of the time.

Other than Darrow, there were far too many characters doing far too much double-crossing. It was so hard to follow, especially since none of the characters felt like unique people, just blobs meant to support or hate Darrow. There was no one I really cared about because nobody did anything worth caring about. They were caricatures, not real people.

Women were written slightly better, at least. But it seems like Brown was directly responding to a problem (as opposed to doing any soul-searching). Human traffickers and rapists are friends who have room to grow, but every man has a fridged woman or two contributing to his character. Yes, Mustang got to have a feminist speech or two. But women characters were still not real people, and they always took a backseat. I'm just still not impressed.

Truly though, what are we doing? The whole thing is a revolution story, but what's the end goal? I can't care about the cause because I don't know what the cause is.

Honestly, I just can't bring myself to care about this book. I was miserable reading it, I don't care enough to write a super long review, and I don't ever want to have to think about it again.

Goodbye, Darrow and Pierce Brown. I hope to never cross paths again.