Not since I first read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix back in 2003 have I encountered a book to so effectively emulate the experience of riding a rollercoaster. Except, instead of sharp drops in gravity and terrifying falls while barely secured to open seats of plastic and metal messing with your innate human fear of heights and your body’s sense of the space-time continuum, it’s just the words and your imagination making your emotions go all whoopity fuck over the place. Golden Son takes the foundation laid in Red Rising and escalates.
Just, escalation everywhere. The whole book is escalators.
It’s too hard for me to talk about what happens in this book in detail. There’s too much to talk about. Instead I’m going to say some vague things that you may apply how you wish.
This book has people shooting out of spaceships as an invasion tactic.
Darrow is being crushed by the weight of his secret life, and the thin line he is forced to walk on a daily basis as he balances his revolutionary tactics with his life as a Gold and his personal relationships.
There is an OH SHIT moment practically every ten pages.
There are almost as many betrayals in this book as there are escalators.
Just when you think the book can’t surprise you anymore, it surprises you seven more times.
There is love and friendship and hatred and vengeance and complicated loyalties.
It explores the way people’s upbrining shapes their opinions about life, and the ways people interact with each other.
Everything is gray, there are no black and whites.
Sevro is amazing.
Everything, all the madness, is held together by a central concern once you step back and take a look at the book as a whole.
The ending pissed me off, almost to the point of hating the book, but not quite.
The book is so good I didn’t even care it was written (sometimes over-written) in first person present tense, which is a POV that can go fuck itself.
This is not YA. It’s adult. Very very adult, and impossible to classify in one genre.
It will make an excellent series of movies, if done right.
I have no idea what’s going to happen next but I’m totally all in.
[4.5 stars]