Joint Review: Golden Son by Pierce Brown (Spoilers)

Okay, if you haven't read Red Rising, you may want to skip this discussion/review. If you haven't read Golden Son yet, you may want to be careful while reading this review. If you have read Golden Son, we totally need to have a party and discuss All The Things.

Proceed carefully.



Title: Golden Son (Red Rising Trilogy #2)
Author: Pierce Brown
Publisher: Del Rey (Random House)
Release Date: January 6, 2015
Acquired Via: Publisher
With shades of The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, and Game of Thrones, debut author Pierce Brown’s genre-defying epic Red Rising hit the ground running and wasted no time becoming a sensation. Golden Son continues the stunning saga of Darrow, a rebel forged by tragedy, battling to lead his oppressed people to freedom.

As a Red, Darrow grew up working the mines deep beneath the surface of Mars, enduring backbreaking labor while dreaming of the better future he was building for his descendants. But the Society he faithfully served was built on lies. Darrow’s kind have been betrayed and denied by their elitist masters, the Golds—and their only path to liberation is revolution. And so Darrow sacrifices himself in the name of the greater good for which Eo, his true love and inspiration, laid down her own life. He becomes a Gold, infiltrating their privileged realm so that he can destroy it from within.

A lamb among wolves in a cruel world, Darrow finds friendship, respect, and even love—but also the wrath of powerful rivals. To wage and win the war that will change humankind’s destiny, Darrow must confront the treachery arrayed against him, overcome his all-too-human desire for retribution—and strive not for violent revolt but a hopeful rebirth. Though the road ahead is fraught with danger and deceit, Darrow must choose to follow Eo’s principles of love and justice to free his people.

He must live for more.

Our Review

You can read Kayla's review of Red Rising, the first book in the trilogy, HERE.

BEWARE! THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR Red Rising (AND MAYBE Golden Son) BELOW!
Amber: So I decided to play hooky the last few minutes of work and finish.....

My first thoughts at the end were "Well, fuck."

At least Sevro and Mustang are free somewhere. They'll get Darrow out somehow.

Kayla: So did you see any of that coming? I knew what's-his-face would end up betraying him, but I didn't think Finchner would be killed. But then again, I didn't see a lot of things coming. Every time I thought I had it figured out, something would spin it on its head.

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Spoilers)

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: William Morrow (HarperCollins)
Release Date: June 18, 2013
Acquired Via: Personal Collection
#1 New York Times Bestseller in hardcover.

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse where she once lived, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

A groundbreaking work as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.

You can read Kayla's review of the book HERE.

My Review (Spoilers Below)

An unnamed narrator visits his childhood home and is flooded with magical memories his adult mind can no longer rationalize. Like Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee, the Hempstock women take the narrator under their wing and open his mind to mysterious possibilities. Mrs. Hempstock reads minds. Old Mrs. Hempstock vanquishes evil forces. Eleven-year-old Lettie Hempstock believes the pond in her farm’s backyard is an ocean.