This was awesome!!!! Yes, it was a rough start, but once we settled into the story, it was perfect!!! It kept me on my toes to the end! I *** 4.39 ***
This was awesome!!!! Yes, it was a rough start, but once we settled into the story, it was perfect!!! It kept me on my toes to the end! I loved it and am looking forward to continuing with the series...more
I absolutely love this series! I think many readers might find it slow and too mired in politics, but it keeps me riveted!!! The writing i*** 4.55 ***
I absolutely love this series! I think many readers might find it slow and too mired in politics, but it keeps me riveted!!! The writing is perfection for the material and I am here for it! Can't wait to get to the next book!!! ...more
I have to be honest, I did not enjoy this book very much and only finished it because I have an illness - a compulsion to finish every boo*** 3.25 ***
I have to be honest, I did not enjoy this book very much and only finished it because I have an illness - a compulsion to finish every book or series I start, of go insane thinking about it with a feeling that I have something hanging over my head and it makes me feel twitchy!!!
I realize this is not a shining recommendation for the book, but I don't think I would recommend it to anyone I know anyway... I am not dissing the author - I adore most of his work and he is one of my all time favorite!!! I am only saying that this particular work was not for me. Than why did I give it the 3.25 stars? Because even in this not for me book Stephenson is still quite brilliant. The man can write and he is capable of delivering some of the most intricate stories put to print! And for a book written in the 90's he has an almost prophetic view of sleeper cells of terrorists in Democratically run societies... I just have an aversion to predominantly political plots - if I was interested, I only need to turn on one of the news TV channels... So, I rather stick with romance and Fantasy, or at the most, historical... And Stephenson has great books in those genres :-)...more
I am blown away! Truly! When I decided to get in on this buddy read I had no expectations whatsoever *** 5 ***
A buddy read with the awesome BB&B group
I am blown away! Truly! When I decided to get in on this buddy read I had no expectations whatsoever. A fantasy, something about Gods and god-killers... Something about an investigation into a murder and possible political intrigue... Sounds pretty run of the mill stuff, nothing to get too excited about. I had never heard of the author and in situations like this I prefer to go in expecting anything... Imagine my utter astonishment when page after page my interest was piqued, my brain was engaged and by 20% I knew I would not stop until I finish the whole thing!
More than 24 hours later, having abandoned everything else as a distraction, I not only have sleep deprivation, but a brain which cannot disengage from the myriad of thoughts and search for logical answers to the unsolved or hinted at issues this book awakened in me... It is weird what, when and how things affect us... While others can breeze through the same content and experience no troubling or deeply moving effects, some of us grapple with deceptively innocuous themes, which in tern mark a read as just a read, or as a significant writing in our lives. I do not know which category City of Stairs falls in, but I know that right now, it sparked both my heart and my mind, making the occurrence unique.
From the first page we enter a world full of humans who are looking for identity. The city is a part of The Continent, a place which had been blessed by 6 Divinities, who created reality according to their will, made laws, and helped the Continentals rule mercilessly the rest of the world, enslaving those who were different from them, subjugating all "other". This appropriation of The Gods and the many perks it gave them, made the citizens of the Continent see themselves as better than the rest of Creation, justifying their right to rule over all others. One of the enslaved nations was Saypur, its people cruelly exploited for centuries. As history teaches us, there are cycles in all things, so the Saypury people rebelled, their leader Kaj defeated the Gods, and soon the tables were turned and the Continent was the one under the conquerors' yolk.
Three generations later the conditions in the Continent are abysmal, the people live in misery and to even consider taking help from the Saypury is an unthinkable blow to their pride. Not that real attempts of help have been offered, nor have the current rulers learned their lessons from being unjustly oppressed not so long before. They rule by suppressing the culture, history and religious traditions of their colonists, ruthlessly enforcing their enchaining laws...
Tensions are raised even more when a Sypury professor is found murdered. Thus enter our MC, Shara Thivani, an unassuming mid-level diplomat, come as a cultural ambassador with no real power to wield. Or so we are supposed to think... She and her over-sized companion are introduced to the Governor ( I love that woman!!!) and other Saypury officials who represent the civil structure of the colonial government. All the main characters are rich in substance and complexity, standing strong on the magnificent background of the City.
The political and structural world we enter is tangible, feels so real you could expect to pick up the morning paper and read about it with your coffee. At the same time, it is so layered, the words which bring it to life so strategically placed, that the sparsity of descriptions catches you off guard, Fantasy lovers, well used to the wordy pages of world-building details, not missing any of it. So, obviously it can be done with fewer words - Robert Jackson Bennett does it right here!!!
There are so many political, social, sexual, and religious issues the content tackles, that I would rather not get into it... However, Slavery is one of those things that is sooo deeply offensive to most of us thinking human beings, that it is very puzzling how come it keeps on popping up cyclically in our history and what obviously absurd reasoning justifies it, seeming to those who practice it as very reasonable at the time... And in this book, the author is masterful at touching on this unceasing and willfully ignorant way the current powers perpetrate the same horrible methods to hold the others subjugated... I am just in awe of this book and the many levels of innuendo it packs in its narrative...!!!!
I already rambled way too long and that was far from my intention. I just wanted to say, that this is a book for those who like to confront their own feelings when it comes to things that are ingrained in our society, but deep inside we know they should be different... It is also written in a very engaging manner, so it is definitely worth the time! Have a great time reading to all!
A ride on the emotional roller-coaster with my buddies from BBB!
It has been over 24 hours since I finished the book and I still feel like som*** 4 ***
A ride on the emotional roller-coaster with my buddies from BBB!
It has been over 24 hours since I finished the book and I still feel like something hit me over the head. I try to concentrate on other things, try to read or watch TV, and all is for not. My mind constantly returns to Red Rising and I finally gave up and decided to sit down and write the review.
This book started like many other YA dystopia - a young person on the brink of adulthood, living in a very tough environment and trying to live up to his personal understanding of himself, which as in most younglings, is that s/he is special and better than most, chiefly adults, somehow.
In this story, we meet young Darrow who works as a Helldiver, an elite miner below the surface of Mars, member of the Red cast (the lowest cast in a color-coded cast system dividing post-Earth humanity), indoctrinated in the belief that all Reds are toiling in the Helium-3 mines in order to build an inhabitable world above ground. Apparently the Helium is necessary for terraforming and the Reds have been promised life in peace and luxury, well, at least not starvation, on the surface once it can sustain life. They are told by the higher casts (the highest are Golds, then Silvers, Coppers, Grays and so on, Reds being the lowest of all) that they are Pioneers, the ones building the future, the backbone of the new world. They have been in the mines for centuries, it may take many more until the goal of a surface world is achieved. The Reds are grown at 13, most get married at 15, and by 40 they are considered terribly old ( I was a bit offended at that myself! ). They work hared and live harder... There is a permanent food shortage, medicine is a luxury, and the things they take true pleasure in are singing and dancing, the ways to continue their cultural history and pride. Of course, as in all this genre, the cast societal structure has the few privileged living on the backs of the many, who are subjugated.
Darrow is 17 years old, he is the best at what he does, he is deeply in love with his beautiful wife Eo, and he thinks that adults are stupid and cowardly. He is at the top of his game and wants for nothing, but the love and joy in the eyes of his woman. This sounds right for a typical YA Dystopia, right? Well yes, but everything following this point was much, much more than that... The way things go from here has been compared by many to the Hunger Games, and I can see the similarities in the setting of the later 2/3 of the book. We have also come to foresee tough times and rough going in those imperfect worlds, readers getting more and more accustomed to expecting beatings, torture, even deaths of characters we grow close to and love. Nothing like the level of brutality in Red Rising, not even close!!!
Dew to many horrible circumstances, Darrow ends up infiltrating the highest cast - the Golds, by undergoing treatments and surgeries in order to become one of them, and with a goal to change the structure of society from within, or as we mundanely call it, deep cover. This comes with the disorientation which we would expect from a person who is sooo deep in his role, that what he thought was black, has many shades of gray, and at times the lofty idealistic objective becomes forgotten, while survival takes everything he has... Many of the people he is expected to hate become his friends, and parameters of his mission have to be readjusted as he goes...
The time Darrow spends in the Institute, a place the Golds go to distinguish themselves and train for leadership in society, is some of the most deviant, brutal, violent and graphic battle for survival I have encountered in a book whose target audience is young or new adults... I have read much more violent and gruesome books, but they usually had to do with the Crusades or other historical evenest of one group concurring another, but there the reader was usually expected to be an adult with some historical knowledge as background. This was unexpected, a bit disturbing, but very vibrant and powerful.
I read many reviews by my GR friends and was very surprised of how polarized the ratings are - they ether liked this a lot, or hated it. Nothing really in between. The comparisons to other YA books of this type are logical, I just have never been effected by any of them as much as i was by this one. The writing was a bit too-staccato at times, the author using short and dense sentences to elevate the drama of the moment, and plenty of the pathos expected from a world built on propaganda. There were repetitions, mainly fro dramatic escalation, and not all main characters were as developed as their importance might have called for, but overall, the story was told in a passionate, powerful way and I was riveted to the pages, forgetting sleep, work and food - trust me, forgetting food just never happens to me! :-)
This was another series I would have never chosen to read on my own, but am glad that my buddies at BBB had in their group reading schedule. I would love to say I recommend this to everyone, but that would not be the truth. People who can tolerate violence and political intrigues are going to find this a strong and interesting read. I would advise my gentler friends to proceed with caution, and the young teens who think they are grown, I would say to put it away for a while... To all the rest, I wish happy and joyful reading!!!...more
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