Golden Son

I'm pretty winded from all the year-end content posting I've been doing (ha!) so I won't say nearly as much as I could about Golden Son and what I will say will be said in bullets. We've come full circle n 2015, guys!

• The cover likely gave it away, but this is a sequel to Red Rising, the book I read a few months ago that I'm confident will be the next big movie franchise for all the tweens. Red Rising did a great job establishing a society, multiple conflicts both large and small, and some three dozen characters or so. So that's our launching point.
• This book has the highest rating of any book I read this year on goodreads. Goodreads! The IMDb of the literary world. Yeah, no. This wasn't in my top five. It might not have even been as good as Red Rising. But it might have been better!
• They're two pieces of a whole, really - with the third and final piece missing. So how can I judge either book without knowing the whole picture?
• Often with planned trilogies like this one, the second installment is the wild card. The first part will be a fairly self-contained story that sets up a bigger picture and the third part will bring everything home in epic fashion. But the second part can be just about anything, from a rehash of the first part (Hunger Games) to a close-but-not-quite failure (Star Wars) to a stakes-raising ramp up (Lord of the Rings). In a lot of ways the second story's quality is the best metric for the trilogy as a whole.
• I don't want to spoil anything - seriously, these are quick reads and they'll be movies soon enough - but Golden Son was one of the most action-packed and stakes-raising "part twos" that I've ever seen or watched. There were so many twists. There was such a high kill count. There was such a fast pace to everything... and still things are left in a place that allows for the third book to have even higher stakes. In that regard, yeah, well done, Pierce Brown.
• So what's the catch? Why am I hesitant to call this an amazing book, let alone better than its predecessor? Honestly, it was just an empty story. There was a ton of action and a fair share of betrayal and it all read like a high-octane action movie, but there was nothing there to make me think, or feel, or even care, honestly. Balls-to-the-wall action is great fun and all, but at the end of the day I want to care about the characters I'm reading about. I want to feel the betrayals and care about what's at stake.
• So, what do I want from Morning Star, the coming-in-2016 conclusion to this series? More than anything, a brake pump. Let's slow things down. Zoom in on the main character and his personal issues, zoom way out and look at this society's struggles overall - it doesn't matter. But we've seen crazy high-stakes action and now it's time to land this ship instead of just flinging it into a wall as hard as possible.

Happy New Year, everyone!