Pierce Brown’s Dark Age Review | One of the Best Books Ever?
Finally finding its footing after switching genres from YA to borderline grimdark, Dark Age propels the Red Rising saga into something more…
When I first read Dark Age, around the time it came out, approximately 3 years ago, I rated this book a 4.5, but now, after I finished reading it the second time, it’s basically a 5/5, and possibly one of my favorite books of all time. And in this review, I’m going to tell you why.
So, Dark Age by Pierce Brown is book five in the Red Rising saga. It’s the second post-trilogy book. So obviously, this along with Iron Gold are very different from the trilogy, which had a lot of YA elements, unlike these two which are closer to grimdark than YA, even if they’re not full grimdark like something from the 40k universe. The story continued pretty much immediately after the end of Iron Gold, and there’s an additional point of view character here, even though Iron Gold already had 4, which is kinda a lot for me. It’s hard for me to care about stories with too many PoV characters because I need to be invested in all of their journeys, I can’t just be invested in one or two of them if I want to like the book. Which brings me to my first point:
Balance.
One of the things that made me unable to give Iron Gold a 5/5 was the fact that I didn’t immediately get invested in the journeys of the PoV characters from the get go. Except for Darrow of course. But in this one, it’s as if all the setups and all the stakes were already taken care of by Iron Gold, and now it’s time for the fun stuff. Back in Iron Gold, I hated Lysander, in a bad way, because he was just so annoying, at least for a bit, but here, I hated Lysander in a good way, because as annoying as he seemed, I get where he’s coming from. I’m not saying fascist, anti democratic caste system is how a society should be, but I get why Lysander would think that it is. I was even rooting for him a bit at some points, which isn’t really something I thought would happen after Iron Gold.
Lysander and Darrow is a very interesting pair of protagonists, or protagonist and antagonist, depending on how you look at things, either way, their dynamic is explored in such a great, nuanced way here that I can’t help but want more of it. They’re really just two people who want the same thing, but have very different visions in how to achieve it which makes it all the more tragic.
Even the new PoV character, Mustang — or Virginia, whichever name you prefer — was really compelling. Her chapters were some of the best of the entire series so far. Not only do they add insight to the parts of the universe that we only previously see from the outside, but they were also excellent in themselves. Filled with some of the most unpredictable (but foreshadowed) moments in the whole series, they would be the highlight of the book, if the rest of the book wasn’t so excellent in the first place.
And I also liked the non-PoV characters here too, from Pax, Volga, and of course, my favorite, Alexandar. They’re all so compelling, and part of it is because of how high the stakes of everything is. They all have such crazy up and down trajectories that you’ll never predict what could happen to any of them.
All of that sounds fun, of course, but it wouldn’t have work so well, if the book doesn’t have my second point, which is…
Clarity.
This is something that bothered me a bit during my first read of the book, because the clarity is achieved through info dumps, which usually is problematic. But in my 2nd read, I think it works because it means I don’t really get lost in the intrigue or in the politics anymore like I did in Iron Gold. In Iron Gold, I simply didn’t know who a lot of the characters were. But here, the info dumps mean that I knew who’s who and what’s what, so the intrigue is super interesting because of that. It adds to the unpredictability I mentioned earlier because it feels like no one is safe from the politics of the world.
Speaking of politics, while yes it’s clear who the book thinks are the good guys, I appreciate that they’re still depicting everything with nuance. I appreciate how the book shows that even with the absolute best of intentions, you can still cause bad things to happen, and when that happens, others will fight against it and try to do what they believe is good. I just really love that part of the story. The balance between nuance and clarity is really well done and it’s something that more books should strive for.
Golden Son Part 2.
While I do think the plot might be a bit long-winded in some parts (the book is 750+ pages…), I have to say, it was paced and structured in a way that made me unable to stop reading. Part 1 of this book felt like it could be the climax of another, and after that I’d thought that it would soon lose momentum, but I was wrong, somehow it kept my attention all the way through in a way that didn’t feel forced or nonsensical. If anything, the way the story was paced revealed a lot about the worldbuilding that we didn’t know before, so that’s another plus. Not only was it unputdownable (that’s not a word), it was also really unpredictable.
Like I said in the beginning, I was never sure which characters were safe. I used to think that this was detrimental to the book, but now I don’t think it is. It reminded me of the best parts of Golden Son, book two of the original trilogy. But while Golden Son is only like this around the ending, Dark Age was like that the whole time. It never lost momentum and it ended on such a high note that made me really unable to wait for the next book, to the point where it basically did Golden Son better than Golden Son itself, which is already a very good book
So yeah, overall, it’s an amazing book, I don’t really have any negative thing to say about it, so it’s definitely a rare 5/5 stars. To answer the question in the title, I don’t know, at least not yet. It takes time before a book can be considered one of the best of all time. But for me, based on everything I’ve read, it certainly is one of my favorite reads.
if you’re wondering about what i thought about the previous book, Iron Gold, you should check out my review of it right here.
