Four stars for the original trilogy, and book one is the entire reason it isn’t five. Red Rising starts slow, reads young, and spends far too long on a wargame at a school before it becomes the thing everyone won’t shut up about. Push through it. Golden Son and Morning Star are a different and much better series, and the original trilogy ends in a real place if you want to stop at three. No spoilers anywhere in this review.
The series at a glance: three books in the original trilogy, complete, sitting inside a wider saga of six published books with a seventh unannounced. Dystopian science fiction and space opera. First person, all Darrow, all three books. Spice sits at a 1. 1,364 pages across the three Kindle editions. I read them on Kindle and finished in March 2026.
Almost every Red Rising review online is written by someone who fell in love on page one. This isn’t that. I liked book one. I didn’t rave about it, I set the series down for the better part of a year, and then I read books two and three five days apart and finally understood what everyone had been yelling about. No spoilers in here for any of the three.
The premise: Darrow is a Red, the bottom color in a caste system that runs the entire solar system. He works a mine under the surface of Mars, told his whole life that he’s a pioneer making the planet livable for the generations coming after him. He isn’t. Mars was terraformed and settled generations ago, and the Golds at the top of the color hierarchy have been lying to his people to keep the labor cheap and buried. What Darrow decides to do about that is the series.
It’s first person, all Darrow, all three books. It’s also violent in a way I want to be upfront about: named characters die badly, Red Rising lingers on it, and this is not a light read by any measure. The comp everyone reaches for is The Hunger Games, and for the first half of book one that’s fair. By book two it’s closer to Dune, and by book three it’s a full space opera with fleet battles and political knife work.
If you read mostly fantasy and have been circling sci fi without committing, this is a good door in. The world is dense but the story isn’t hard, and there’s no physics homework waiting for you. If you want a romance at the center of your books, this isn’t it, and I’ll come back to that.
Vibe Check: Is This an Easy Read?
Easy is the wrong word. Fast is the right one, eventually. Book one takes a while to get moving. The opening in the mines is dense, the invented vocabulary arrives with no glossary, and the middle section is a long wargame at a Gold training academy that reads like The Hunger Games in the snow. I got through it. I also understand every single person who has told me they quit right there.
Then the pacing changes completely. I read Golden Son and Morning Star on Kindle five days apart, which is not something I normally do to myself on a weeknight. Once the scope opens up past the school, every chapter ends on a knife. Emotionally it stays heavy the whole way. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl for the escalation and the body count, or Blood Over Bright Haven for how far it’s willing to go, you’ll be fine here.
Red Rising, Book One
The weak link, and the entire reason the trilogy isn’t five stars. The opening is dense with no glossary, Darrow’s voice reads young, and the Institute wargame runs well past the point where it has made its argument. Good, but nowhere near what the series becomes. Pay the tax and keep going.
This is the weak link and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Three things drag it.
The opening is slow and dense. Brown drops you into the mines with a full vocabulary of invented slang and a caste system built on colors, and he explains almost none of it on the way in. That’s a defensible choice and it pays off later. It also means the first stretch is asking for patience it hasn’t earned yet.
It reads young. Darrow’s voice in book one is a teenager’s voice, and the central setup is teenagers being made to fight each other for the entertainment of the people in charge. If you’ve read any amount of YA dystopia, you’ll feel like you’ve been in this building before.
And the Institute drags. The wargame section is the biggest chunk of the book and it runs well past the point where it’s made its argument. I spent a lot of it waiting for the story to leave the school.
None of that made me quit. I finished it, liked it fine, and then other books got in the way and I didn’t pick up book two for months. That’s the honest version. Book one is good. It is nowhere near what the series becomes, and if you judge the trilogy by it you will be wrong.
Golden Son, Book Two
Where it turns, and it turns hard. The scale explodes into fleet battles and solar system politics, Darrow finally loses at real cost, and the supporting cast stops orbiting him and becomes the reason you keep going. The betrayals are relentless. Book one is the tax you pay for this.
This is where it turns, and it turns hard. Three things change at once.
The scale explodes. The story leaves the academy and becomes fleet battles, family politics, and the machinery of an entire solar system. What looked like a survival story in book one turns out to have been the prologue to a war.
Darrow finally loses. Properly, repeatedly, and at real cost. The arrogance that made book one feel young stops being a flaw in the writing and becomes the actual subject of the book. That shift is the single best thing Brown does in the trilogy.
And the supporting cast takes over. Sevro, Mustang and the rest stop being names orbiting Darrow and become the reason you keep going. By the back half I cared more about what happened to them than about the revolution.
The betrayals are relentless. Somewhere in the middle I stopped being able to guess what the next chapter would do, and that almost never happens to me. If you take one thing from this review, take this: book one is the tax you pay for Golden Son.
Morning Star, Book Three
Has to land a revolution and lands it. The longest of the three and it earns every page, with payoffs Brown set up two books earlier arriving exactly where they hurt most. Best of all, it actually ends, instead of softening into a sequel hook.
Morning Star has to land a revolution and it lands it. It’s the longest of the three at 518 pages and it earns every one of them. Payoffs Brown set up two books earlier arrive, and the ones designed to hurt hurt the most.
What I appreciated most is that it ends. Not a soft landing into a sequel hook. An actual ending to the arc that started in the mines, with the questions from book one answered. That’s rarer than it should be in a genre that treats every finale as a setup.
Four stars for the trilogy overall, and that number is entirely book one’s doing. Two and three are five star books sitting behind a three star opening.
Who Should Skip Red Rising
Two groups should skip this, and I’d rather say so than talk you into something you’ll resent.
If you want a light read, this isn’t it. The violence is graphic, it happens to people you’ve spent hundreds of pages with, and Brown does not cut away when it would be kinder to. There’s no version of this trilogy that works as a beach book.
If you want romance at the center, look elsewhere. There is a relationship and it matters to the plot, but it is not the engine and it is not on the page the way it is in the romantasy that fills most of my shelf. If that’s what you came for, go read Alchemised instead and come back to this one later.
Where to Stop: The Trilogy vs the Full Saga
Here’s the part most reviews skip. Red Rising is not a trilogy anymore. There are six published books, and a seventh called Red God that Pierce Brown and Del Rey still have not given a release date as of September 2026. The reading order is:
- Red Rising (2014)
- Golden Son (2015)
- Morning Star (2016)
- Iron Gold (2018)
- Dark Age (2019)
- Light Bringer (2023)
- Red God (no announced release date)
Books one through three are the original trilogy and they close their own loop. Iron Gold jumps forward about a decade and starts a second arc with multiple viewpoint characters, which is a genuinely different reading experience.
I’ve read the first three. Iron Gold is on my list and I haven’t started it, which is exactly why this review stops where it does. If you want a finished story and an exit, Morning Star is a real stopping point and nobody should make you feel bad about using it. If you want the whole saga, go in knowing the ending hasn’t been written yet.
Final Thoughts
The Red Rising trilogy is the best sci fi I’ve read in a long time and the only sci fi in an otherwise fantasy heavy reading year. If you like your books fast, brutal, and willing to kill people you’ve gotten attached to, read it. And if you bounced off book one, the problem was book one.
Three books, 1,364 pages, and a real ending waiting at the end of them. That’s a reasonable ask for a series this loud. Pay the tax on book one and go collect on the other two.
