Golden Son by Pierce Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s been a while since I read RED RISING, so I feel like a missed out a little with GOLDEN SON. Don’t get me wrong, if you liked the first book in the series, you’ll like this one, and probably better than the first, because everything is bigger: bigger stakes, bigger battles, bigger worlds. The action is punched up, and if you like your sci-fi on the range of solar systems, you can have it here. Whereas the first one was like the Hunger Games on a terraformed Mars, GOLDEN SON is more like an episode of STAR TREK where everyone’s favorite bold space explorers have to engage in a little diplomacy with the Klingons (and everyone knows how well that works out, right?) There’s less transformation here and more politics. There is probably more death, and death that was supposed to hit me hard, but it’s been too long since I read RED RISING for me to be invested in the characters. You won’t find much “remember how this happened?” in GOLDEN SON–and I wish there had been, because as much as I liked the first book, I only had the vaguest sketches of what happened in my head (the curse of reading too many books, I guess). Regardless, this is a great book. The action is tight and the world-building is vast. Betrayal and revelations are around every corner. I just felt like there was an undercurrent I was missing because I didn’t remember some of the plotlines from the first book.
Also, beware the ending–you’ll want to know when the next book is out, and why it isn’t out already, because you will probably want to throw GOLDEN SON at the wall when you finish. Book 3, MORNING STAR, can’t come soon enough!
Received as a free digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.