Red Queen
Victoria Aveyard
Mare is a lowly Red servant, right up until the point that she meets a prince. Then she finds herself thrown into the world of the Silvers with her in the middle of a battle that seems to have been going for a long time, despite Mare only just waking up to the fact that she is going to have to be more proactive about making the Silver’s pay for the Red’s miserable lives.
Whiplash! The ending took me completely by surprise. Phew! My head may have literally flipped backwards. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to keep reading, but in fact, it was in a course of a couple of pages that the whole thing ended up on its head.
He he, Mare is weaker than her makeup. Other reviewers found that odd or poorly written, I actually got a little giggle out of it. Her being obsessed with her weakness? Well, she’s a girl isn’t she? I actually found where she wasn’t sure about how to kill people or care about them quite endearing. It’s perfectly ok to have characters who change their minds about major things like MURDER.
It hardly seems worth it to review this novel, GoodReads has over 20k reviews. However, I’m going to anyway, just for my own records. I picked this novel up for free from #YAmatters, a Victorian State Library event last year that talked about 2016’s novels to come.
I was going to give this 4 stars, but man this is a polarising novel! People seem to love or hate it, depending on what other novels they have read. Reading their reviews has highlighted to me a couple of other novels I might enjoy. As it is, I haven’t read those, so I thought this novel was good.
Em had to kill to get her new position in the court. I wonder whether some people are looking down on her as having ‘cheated’, and in fact, some of the dialogue is about revenge and trying to hold down sensible ideas after killing people. It’s something I’ve been contemplating lately, with all the fiction I have been reading. It does sound like sometimes the easiest solution is to kill the figurehead!
This should have been called The Slow News Sisters instead of Keep Me Posted. What’s wrong with using a catchy term, even if it is later used in the novel? Not to mention it would have been a heads up for the progress being glacial.
What I loved was that the blending of fact and fiction made me feel at home in the novel. I didn’t object that I never really understood everything behind Lord’s motives. I didn’t mind that there was no happy ending.
When will I get tired of extreme-situation teenage novels? Maybe some time soon. I’m feeling an end of my sympathy for idiots that let love get in the way of all things! But real life problems? Yes, I’ll take those. This novel isn’t too far off course for things that could happen. Who knows how many people are having this problem, and it’s just not picked up?
You’d think that since I was up until 1am finishing this book (and doing some other writing) than means I enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m not sure that I did. There were huge time gaps and gaps in Jinhau’s memory that made me fall out of the novel time and time again.
As always, I preferred the personal stories rather than the advice given in this novel. I think if you are going for a more ‘traditional’ career (not a university and teaching focussed career like mine) this novel is going to be perfect for you. I’d choose it as a gift for someone just starting out at their first job.
I put off reading this novel for a very long time, because I knew it was the second in the series. Finally, in a bid to cull down the number of older novels I had sitting on my shelf, I decided to pick it up. A quick google of the first novel in the series seemed to suggest that I didn’t need to read the first one – this was definitely the case.
This was such a slow novel. I was halfway through and saying to my partner that I wasn’t sure I could face keeping on reading it. I started out being a bit wary of it, because of the changing perspectives.
I wasn’t won over by the way there were ‘bytes’ of information from the way that Scarlett and Lucas thought. I didn’t like the consciousnesses changing, and I thought Avery was an idiot. A rich, spoilt idiot.