Whenever I review a book that is part of a series, I always find it hard to really judge what was good in the book and what was not so good in the book, because I don’t want to judge something that will improve later on, and I don’t get the full picture, so this time I decided to do a series review of the Red Queen series! I’ve never done these before, so let me know your thoughts and if you like it!
I actually started reading the Red Queen series a while back, when the first book came out and me and my best friend read it together (shout out to Emily!! <3 ). However, I never ended up finishing the series, because I forgot to read the next book when it came out. So here I am before you all today sharing my series review! Also for those of you who want to read the series, I tried to keep as many spoilers out of the review as possible.
Blurb:
This is a world divided by blood—red or silver. The Reds are commoners, ruled by a Silver elite in possession of god-like superpowers. And to Mare Barrow, a seventeen-year-old Red girl from the poverty-stricken Stilts, it seems like nothing will ever change. That is until she finds herself working in the Silver Palace. Here, surrounded by the people she hates the most, Mare discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy the balance of power. Fearful of Mare’s potential, the Silvers hide her in plain view, declaring her a long-lost Silver princess, now engaged to a Silver prince. Despite knowing that one misstep would mean her death, Mare works silently to help the Red Guard, a militant resistance group, and bring down the Silver regime. But this is a world of betrayal and lies, and Mare has entered a dangerous dance—Reds against Silvers, prince against prince, and Mare against her own heart.
Red Queen
To start with the first book, I enjoyed it but I found it to be a little chaotic, with everything being all over the place. Multiple things were going on at the same time, such as the thing with her new job, her brothers, her new powers, the romance, It was all just happening at the same time so it was hard to distinguish, and hard to keep track of everything going on. Something that I liked was the huge twist at the end of the book, it was something that I was not really expecting at all. I also think that I would have understood and enjoyed the book more if there had been more world building that I could go off of.
Blurb:
If there’s one thing Mare Barrow knows, it’s that she’s different. Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.
The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind. Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.
Glass Sword
I found the second book to be quite repetitive; the entire book was basically a wild goose chase for new bloods. As a character, Mare became more cruel and lost a lot of humanity. However one way that she never changed was that she kept repeating the same mistakes over and over, thus, I found many of the same events to happen over and over with minimal change. I also found the romance to be very wishy-washy and just barely there which kind of annoyed me because it should either be there or not at all. It felt like Victoria Aveyard added it because she had too, because all YA books had some sort of romance. I think that the book wouldn’t have really lost much without the romance. Overall I just found this book to be a little bland.
Blurb:
Mare Barrow is a prisoner, powerless without her lightning, tormented by her lethal mistakes. She lives at the mercy of a boy she once loved, a boy made of lies and betrayal. Now a king, Maven Calore continues weaving his dead mother’s web in an attempt to maintain control over his country—and his prisoner. As Mare bears the weight of Silent Stone in the palace, her once-ragtag band of newbloods and Reds continue organizing, training, and expanding. They prepare for war, no longer able to linger in the shadows. And Cal, the exiled prince with his own claim on Mare’s heart, will stop at nothing to bring her back. When blood turns on blood, and ability on ability, there may be no one left to put out the fire—leaving Norta as Mare knows it to burn all the way down.
Kings Cage
The third book was when I started getting kind of annoyed at Mare and Victoria Aveyard. I thought there was going to be more of world building, like understanding how the new bloods became how they were and how the world worked in general when she found Julians’ history books, but it was all just mostly where she just basically embellished what we already knew about the world or introduced info that did nothing for the story. Ultimately, I found that I kept waiting for something to happen in this book, but I just found that it was just Mare whining about how she was stuck in the shackles of silent stone, and how she couldn’t get out and she didn’t know whether to hate or love Maven the entire time.
Blurb:
Mare Barrow learned this all too well when Cal’s betrayal nearly destroyed her. Now determined to protect her heart—and secure freedom for Reds and newbloods like her—Mare resolves to overthrow the kingdom of Norta once and for all… starting with the crown on Maven’s head. But no battle is won alone, and before the Reds may rise as one, Mare must side with the boy who broke her heart in order to defeat the boy who almost broke her. Cal’s powerful Silver allies, alongside Mare and the Scarlet Guard, prove a formidable force. But Maven is driven by an obsession so deep, he will stop at nothing to have Mare as his own again, even if it means demolishing everything—and everyone—in his path.War is coming, and all Mare has fought for hangs in the balance.
War Storm
In the fourth book, I had such high hopes that this was going to be the book where Victoria Aveyard redeemed Maven which was what I thought she was building to the entire time, because there would be flashes of life in Maven but then in the end they just kind end up leading up to nothing. This book was where I found that Mare to be really haughty about her power, and thought that nothing compared to her which was not true at all, she really just talked on and on about her powerful power that she just automatically developed and nothing could happen without her which really annoyed me.
Mare had a lot of self importance and dramatics that were extremely unnecessary and were really kind of funny at times. One quote that cracked me up was “I will not be a red queen.” This single quote just canceled out the entire series. What is the point of the RED QUEEN series if she isn’t going to be a red queen??!!!!
Thoughts on the Overall Series
The side characters were kind of two dimensional, such as Kilorn. I think he was supposed to be a part of the love triangle (Love triangle? Love square?) but he was basically just a side piece who Aveyard used whenever she felt like she needed him. Victoria Aveyard also used the Chosen One trope for this book which she DID NOT use correctly. I always found Mare to be inhuman, her emotions always too perfect. Mare always seemed like she was straddling the line between human and otherworldly and I think that Aveyard was trying to make her human but she came off as otherworldly. It was like Aveyard was writing what she thought a human would think like and the entire book had really overly flowery phrases such as “When the maids pinch and pull me into a gown, I feel like a corpse being dressed for her funeral” from Red Queen, “I am a dam trying to hold back an entire ocean” from Glass Sword, “Such simple beauty has no place here without the corruption of blood or ambition or betrayal,” from Kings Cage, and “I pray to any god that might exist. To anyone who might listen,” from War Storm. Phrases such as these were VERY common throughout the series, and the majority of the sentences were like these. Most of the sentences in the series seemed like they belonged on the trailer of a movie, which makes sense for a movie but not for a book. I think that phrases such as these also work for fantasy books such as Throne of glass or ACOTAR series but they didn’t really work for this particular series.
I think that if Aveyard worked on the romance, stopped playing too much into tropes, cut out the overly flowery phrases, brought in some world building, and cut down on the filler pages, it would have been a much better book. I have also heard people that LOVED this series so don’t just take this review into consideration before deciding whether or not to read this series.
| Characters | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Plot | ★★★☆☆ |
| Ending | ★★★☆☆ |
| Storytelling | ★★☆☆☆ |
| Overall | 2.5 |
Nice work Anjali