Dark Age by Pierce Brown Published by Random House Publishing Group on July 30, 2019
Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Dystopian
Pages: 800
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Morning Star returns to the Red Rising universe with the thrilling sequel to Iron Gold. “Brown’s plots are like a depth charge of nitromethane dropped in a bucket of gasoline. His pacing is 100% him standing over it all with a lit match and a smile, waiting for us to dare him to drop it.”—NPR
He broke the chains. Then he broke the world…. A decade ago Darrow led a revolution, and laid the foundations for a new world. Now he’s an outlaw. Cast out of the very Republic he founded, with half his fleet destroyed, he wages a rogue war on Mercury. Outnumbered and outgunned, is he still the hero who broke the chains? Or will he become the very evil he fought to destroy? In his darkening shadow, a new hero rises. Lysander au Lune, the displaced heir to the old empire, has returned to bridge the divide between the Golds of the Rim and Core. If united, their combined might may prove fatal to the fledgling Republic. On Luna, the embattled Sovereign of the Republic, Virginia au Augustus, fights to preserve her precious demokracy and her exiled husband. But one may cost her the other, and her son is not yet returned. Abducted by enemy agents, Pax au Augustus must trust in a Gray thief, Ephraim, for his salvation. Far across the void, Lyria, a Red refugee accused of treason, makes a desperate bid for freedom with the help of two unlikely new allies. Fear dims the hopes of the Rising, and as power is seized, lost, and reclaimed, the worlds spin on and on toward a new Dark Age.
Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga:RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE
Have you ever been in or part of a fandom that you love SO much and then something new gets released? And you *gasp* don’t love it? How do you exist in that fandom still? It’s such a hard place to be and that is exactly where I find myself after finishing the behemoth that is Pierce Brown’s Dark Age.
Let’s get started by saying I feel like some people will want to come for me and my Howler cloak. And to that I will say, you can try to pry it off me over my dead body, you slagging Pixie. I love the first trilogy with all of my heart. I’ve reread it three times. I have laughed and cried and poured so much love into those books and that world. I rave about it to people and book push it on anyone who says they even remotely like sci-fi. I own multiple articles of clothing representing my dedication to being a bloodydamn Howler. But I cannot say the same for this new trilogy.
When Iron Gold was announced, I was elated and excited and when I read it, I was frustrated but willing to allow for some of the things that happened in hopes that the books to come would make me love it like the previous books. That… didn’t happen. A lot of my frustrations with Iron Gold had to do with Darrow and his decisions and actions that felt unlike him. I didn’t have that issue with Dark Age – in fact, I feel like we barely even got that many chapters with Darrow’s POV. However, when we did, I will say he feels more Darrow and I was glad to see it.
One of the biggest issues I have with Dark Age is that the scope of the book felt a little too big. There are a lot of moving pieces and different plots. Pierce is a master at connecting these sort of things and leaving the reader in awe of his genius but I feel like here, it was TOO much. The strings between all these pieces and new developments felt like they weren’t as taut as they should’ve been. Instead of leaving me in awe of genius, I started to just feel like I was losing track of the direction of political machinations and character motivations. Things felt scattered.
I also got a lot of Game of Thrones vibes and not in a good way. There’s a reason I gave up on Game of Thrones! In Dark Age, I started getting just tired of the killing, death, violence, death, destruction, despair, brutality and did I mention violence just over and over and over. I was just so tired of it all. Especially when some of the violence felt gratuitous and done for shock value rather than being actually necessary. There has always been violence in the first trilogy but it always felt like it was serving a purpose. Here it felt like it was being forced down my throat and it really took away from the emotional punch certain deaths should have had. I’m not sure if I just started getting desensitized to it all but I became distanced from characters and events. I started to lose my investment in the story and emotional connection.
I also really, really hate Lysander. He is a slagging bloodydamn idiot that I want to choke the gold supremacy out of so badly. Every time I saw I was getting yet another one of his chapters (I swear that pixie got the most chapters out of everyone) I almost groaned out loud. That made it so hard to read this one because I just DIDN’T WANT TO READ HIS CHAPTERS. I hate him. He’s annoying AF to read. And when you hate being in the POV of someone that culminates in hundreds of pages, that’s a problem.
Dark Age is, well, dark and with the slow pacing, I really struggled. Coming in at just under 800 pages, I felt like it could’ve been trimmed. There were some long, meandering speeches in here that almost felt like it was trying too hard to be epic when hey, the first trilogy was already epic enough.
I realize I’ve now spent paragraphs talking about all the things I didn’t like and there are quite a few things I DID like quite a bit! Certain scenes really brought back that spark of my love for the original trilogy. And there is no denying that Pierce is a phenomenal writer. His action scenes are on point, his plotting is detailed, he brings characters to life! I just think Dark Age felt like it got away from him a bit. There is only so much death death death I can take and all the moving pieces in this one weren’t cohesive enough. I will read the last book because I will need to know what happens but I really think that after that, I’m going to just obliviate this from my mind. I’ll go on living happily in my love of the first trilogy.
The worst part of it all is that it seems just about everyone else loves it. Everyone else is touting this as “the best yet!” and how am I the black sheep on this? Does no one else see what I see? I’m just very sad and frustrated. Let me know if you’ve read this one and want to discuss! Otherwise I’ll just be here, curled up in my cloak.
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