Red Queen - Victoria Aveyard [Review]

Title: Red Queen

Author: Victoria Aveyard

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fiction

Publisher: HarperTeen

Publishing date: February 10^th, 2015

Pages: 383

Rating

★★★✩✩

Hello! It’s been a while since I wrote a review, but school kept me busy. I finished this book three months ago, it’s a really popular one that I really wanted to read, Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard.

            Red Queen takes us to a dystopian world set after a world war. In this world, some persons

Mare Barrow fanart.

evolved and gained certain abilities, these persons have the singularity of having silver blood, while the people that remained with red blood didn’t obtain abilities. This makes the Silvers superior and they margin the Reds, making them live afraid of them and in poverty. If the Reds don’t get a job or profession before certain age, they are recruited to the army due to a war that has been going on for 100 years. The protagonist of this story is Mare Barrow, she is about to get conscripted because she has no job, so she is a thief, and tries her best to provide something to her family, even thou her parents dislike her ways of providing. Trying to help a friend to avoid conscription turns Mare’s life into a mess. One sad night for her, she tries to steal from a boy and he turns out to be Prince Cal. He gets her a job at the palace as a servant, but there she will find out that she is not a normal Red, she is special. Because of this her life will completely change.

            Wow that synopsis was long and, I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

            I had high expectations with this book; sadly, I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. The book is narrated in first person by the protagonist, Mare, so we only know what she knows… which is not so much. The beginning is kind of slow because it’s an introduction to this world, which is pretty interesting, but Mare complains every page about how much she hates the Silvers.

            The plot has several clichés, I’ve seen a lot of books lately about a girl that suddenly lives

From left to right: Maven, Mare, Evangeline and Cal.

with royals, but still I think this book is unique in its own way. The book has a weird love triangle, one that I wasn’t expecting at first, and Mare’s interactions with the main love interest seemed insta love like, she kisses him once and then she can´t stop thinking about him when she hadn’t a solid opinion about him before. The second love interest was my fave guy, and I liked him better, their relationship seemed more natural and they spent a lot of time together, but I still felt that Mare didn’t really care about him.

            I had an issue with the characters, most of them were unlikable, I couldn’t stand Mare, she believed she was smart but lacked a lot of common sense, and to me, she seemed to be selfish and lost sight of her priorities really easily. I think that the only characters that had common sense were Farley and Julian. Maven was my favorite, he was a sweet boy that deserved to be protected and happy. I actually don’t have a strong opinion about Cal, but he was ok. And the rest of the characters were easy to forget, irrelevant, or I hated them.

            What I enjoyed the most about the book are the interesting rules of royalty, like the nobility

From top to bottom: Queen Elara,
Evangeline and Mare.
Fanart by gibblycat.

has their own colors and they always wear them, the huge diversity of abilities, and the end of the book, it was really exciting, fast passed and I couldn’t put down the book.

            Red Queen has an interesting premise, love, action, and strategic planning, sadly it has slightly uninteresting characters, and it could’ve focused more on the real conflict instead of Mare’s personal drama. I recommend it if you are looking for something easy to read with some YA cliché.

            I really hope the second book is better than this one. Have you read these books? What do you think about them?