Book #99 of 2023:
Light Bringer by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #6)
Another thrilling installment of the sprawling Red Rising space opera, and although I still don’t think this sequel era quite matches the engaging fury that propelled the original trilogy, this is easily the finest of the later books yet (and a welcome step back from the bleakness of its excellent but aptly-named predecessor Dark Age). The four narrator perspectives are nicely woven together, the cinematic action sequences are as stunning as ever, and the various plot twists of sudden betrayals, alliances, and other intrigues are breathtaking yet firmly rooted in a sense of personal history amongst the relevant players seeking to outmaneuver one another. A few individual confrontations are particularly well-earned — CLANG! CLANG!, eh, fellow readers? — and pay off longstanding arcs with aplomb, while central protagonist Darrow undergoes remarkable growth and change in his own journey through life and reckoning with past misdeeds.
Indeed, I like this novel so much that I’ve come close to rating it five stars, which I haven’t done for this extended series since #2 Golden Son. My one critique — which might be unavoidable for volume three of a planned quartet, spanning in Game of Thrones fashion such a deep ensemble and vast arena of space — is that a few characters who are important early on seem to then vanish from the narrative, while others we would expect to take a role in the latest events instead stay largely off-screen for now. I remain fully on-board with this saga and have complete faith in author Pierce Brown to deliver a satisfying conclusion in the next title, but this one falls just short of his best work in my final analysis.
[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and gore.]
★★★★☆
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