Darrow is a teenager and a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he willingly works all day and gets paid in scraps, because he believes their efforts are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations, and saving the whole human civilization. But Darrow finds that everything he knows is a lie. Humans have been on Mars for generations, living in sprawling cities on the surface. Darrow and the Reds are just insignificant slaves to an arrogant ruling class.
Aided by the mysterious terrorist group the Sons of Ares, Darrow infiltrates the world of Golds, the highest caste and the ruling class. He joins other Gold children at the gruelling Institute where they train the next generation of civilization’s overlords. He fights and competes for his life, and the very future of civilization, against the best and most brutal of the Golds. He will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies, because this is just a hurdle to cross before he brings down all of society.
The writing is dense and wordy, and the prose is splendid. But the plot and storyline are so tedious that I struggled to get through this book. First, world building. The first fifth of this book is dedicated to setting the stage and stoking the reader’s sense of outrage at the injustice of it all. But the overly complex word salad just had me rolling my eyes instead.
And then, there’s the lead, Darrow. He is the average everyman, but he is perfect in every single way. He dies, but is saved by a miraculous mechanism which is not addequately explained. He has never been educated, but a crash course in math and science allows him to be on par, nay, superior to those who have had a lifetime of schooling? He bests the Golds in each skill because he was a miner in his previous life and is good with his fingers?
He is this archetypal young adult lead. Someone with humble roots so everyone can relate to him, but at the same time, he is the chosen one, the one teenaged superman that leads generations of oppressed masses against a tyrannical ruling class… I wish to run into him in the street so I can ignore him and keep walking.
The remaining four fifths of the book is just Hunger Games. Bunch of kids fighting to the death, last man standing wins, but since the system is rigged, Darrow fights the system, the real enemy…
I wish the book had some redeeming quality… but I fail to put my finger on it.