Morning Star

Late last year, I read Red Rising and its sequel Golden Son, saying in my review of the second book:

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 [Golden Son was wall-to-wall] 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.

So, what's the verdict?

[Timpani drum roll]

[Dramatic pause]

[A brief, high-pitched squeaker of a fart]

Five-hundred pages of tersely described space fights and planet-ruling college-aged kids betraying one another. Early on it looked as though I might get my wish for a brake pump. Our protagonist, captured and tortured for a year after the shocking events that concluded Golden Son, returns bruised and battered and broken to his very humble origins. I'm thinking, yes. Okay. Here's where we break into the third act. Here's where our guy reconnects to his roots. Here's where he "remembers what's worth fighting for." Here's where - oh, no, never mind, there he goes zipping off into space again to kidnap a billionaire or stop a moon from exploding. And just like that, Morning Star turned into Golden Son all over again.

I mean, I think I liked it better than Golden Son, at least a little. It did conclude neatly, if not amazingly. Then again, the second book was a page-turner whereas this one was a little more sluggish. I guess I stopped caring about the story somewhere in 2016. Pierce Brown had an interesting little something going with Red Rising - sort of a more sophisticated and sci-fi-flavored version of The Hunger Games with lots of references to Greek and Roman antiquity. But after an impressive-by-YA-standards job at building worlds and setting stakes, he spent the next two books flinging characters back and forth between alliances - his protagonist oblivious to all of it of course - and ended up bringing more than a few people back from the dead (or, just as bad, and more frequently, allowing them to be captured only to get away at an opportune moment). It's not "bad" or "lazy" writing, it's just YA fiction being YA fiction.

Brown's already announced another trilogy set in the same world and in it he intends to explore the society surrounding the events of this civil-ish war for the solar system throne. That's great, but I'm not biting. You had your chance, bud!

I'm done with YA fiction, guys. (Almost. Still have one more on the backlog...)