Why do I always end up with books on my reading list only to find out it's YA when I start reading? YA is just not my favorite genre these days. I dislike the tropes, I hate the 'young but perfect' protagonists, and it's usually retreading whatever's the hip YA these days. Red Rising is quite obviously following routes laid out by Battle Royale and The Hunger Games first. It adds interesting sci-fi stuff to the mix, my favorite in the novel. And yet.

Darrow is a Red miner on Mars. He's 16, very good at mining, and happily married. But the Reds are opressed by the other ruling classes of Mars, most particularly the Gold class. Reds suffer as they mine precious metals required for terraforming Mars for the inhabitants of broken Earth. Or so they think.

It's all a kind of Truman show. Outside the mining colonies, the ruling classes have already successfully terraformed Mars and are enjoying a luxurious lifestyle on the backs of the lower classes, like the Reds, or the Pinks (basically a class of prostitutes). A rebel group called Sons of Ares adopts Darrow and modifies his body, to turn him into a Gold. He is to enter their Institute, where Gold teenagers are shaped into the leaders of the future, in a sort of Capture the Flag survival game between different houses.

I was really into it in the bits where Darrow learns the truth about the lies of the Golden, but I was not so much into the Hunger Games style Battle Royale game. In fact, I found it problematic. Female contestants get raped, of course. Because why not, modern YA must include Rape Culture. It's all whiter than white, because nothing's whiter than the Gold class. There was a passage that smelled like homophobia, when two male contestants slept next to each other and were uncomfortable with it. Eh.

Would I recommend this book? Probably not. Do I want to continue reading because I want to know what's going on with Virginia (IDGAF about Darrow, honestly), absolutely.