Red Queen

Author: Victoria Aveyard

One-sentence summary: A young woman wrestles with who to trust as she discovers a powerful hidden talent and finds herself suddenly engaged to a prince and embroiled in the beginnings of a bloody revolution.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: We liked the story and it moved along, throwing out some interesting twists along the way.

Our least favorite thing about it: The writing style was all “tell” and no “show.”

Main Topics of Discussion: Dystopian YA Fiction Genre, Plot, Characterization, Betrayal

Our favorite quote: “This world is Silver, but it is also gray. There is no black and white.”

Notes: Our general impression of this book was that the story was actually quite good. We liked the plot (despite some glaring holes we’re expected to ignore) and how the events drove the book. For the first of a series, we felt like the book had a complete story arc, which we appreciated. BUT, the book suffered from poor writing style that had us raising our eyebrows in annoyance. Having read quite a bit of this genre, we felt that this interesting story was not served well by the poor writing. And now for some of our discussion points:

• One of the more interesting things about this book were the characters. Oddly enough, the main character was one of the least interesting. The two princes were both very interesting and kept us guessing at their motives and true natures up until the very end. (Even though there was a certain predictability to the main twist at the end).
• We especially liked Cal because he was hard to read – even for the reader outside the story looking in. We appreciated his complicated character. In fact, he was the one person that we were interested in finding out more about at the end of the book.
• There were a few plot holes that had us scratching our heads: having Cal choose to save Mare’s life was something we could buy, but having her just try to convince him of the validity of the rebellion was never going to work. But Maven convinced all of the rebels to act based on Cal choosing to save Mare’s life. So, huh?
• The sentence, “anyone can betray anyone” was repeated way too much. Ok, we get it. This is where the “telling” style of writing fell way short of “showing.” It’s like the author didn’t trust us to get it with just the actions and words of the characters (which is showing). No, he had to have Mare say it to herself so that we would have it literally spelled out for us. Sigh. There are many other examples of this.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We were at the lake house! We waited until the last day (Sunday) to discuss the book because we were waiting on a couple of us to finish it.

What We Ate: All of our usual lake house food (brisket tacos, Papa Murphy’s pizza, chocolate cookies, s’mores, veggies and dip, muffins, eggs, smoothies.)