Morning Star (Red Rising Saga #3)

The “conclusion” of Darrow’s story is one that I thought would take me less time to reach. I started reading this book very excitedly almost 2 months ago and yet I essentially dropped it in favour of Paddington and Le Petit Nicolas before finally reading it through the end. This hiatus is one thing that needs to be covered first, the quotation marks around “conclusion” are another that are better covered at the end.

Golden Son finished with a terrible low point, the death of almost all of Darrow’s key allies brought him and the Red Rebellion arguably down lower than where they started in book 1. Climbing back up from this without some Deus Ex Machina or a few contrived plot points was a challenge I was apprehensive about and in some ways I unfortunately got proven right. Darrow’s experience as the Jackal’s prisoner is haunting and well written, as is his inevitable escape (can’t really count that as a spoiler as if Darrow doesn’t escape the story doesn’t happen). However, the story then gets a bit “by the book” in its progression. Darrow is now openly out of Gold society and as such the story takes the generic “join the resistance” path that Hunger Games also took. Darrow also needs new allies so we get an also fairly cliché “get some new friends” progression and this all brings us to the 50% mark.

It’s somewhere around the 40% mark that I decided to take a break from Morning Star. I just wasn’t feeling it at that point. The story had become generic, the reskinned Hunger Games feeling had never been stronger and having Darrow’s progression go down to square -1 to have it then resolve in just 1 book wasn’t a very believable set up. Think of it as building a house for a year, get to the halfway point, then knocking absolutely everything down and flood the area and then announce that you’re going to remove the water, start building again and finish it completely within the next 6 months. That’s how Morning Star’s start felt.

Nevertheless, I was committed to finishing it and when I eventually got back to it and past the 50% mark, the story starts picking up again and the highs and lows of the story that were book 1 and 2s strengths take over once more. The arguably worst bit of the second half is Darrow’s relationship with Mustang as they’ve always had a pseudo-romantic relationship that however never really got anywhere with Darrow being in constant self doubt about the fairness of such an engagement given his dead wife and his role in the rebellion. Nevertheless their relationship moves very quickly in the last bits of the story in ways that I found contrived and entirely undeserved even if the progression here makes for a poetic ending.

The ending otherwise is as perfect as it can be by being neither too optimistic nor too grim, you get the payout of this 3 book saga you’d expect but the way you get to it is never a given…except it isn’t the ending. Morning Star despite having an epilogue that reads like a final chapter of at least Darrow’s story if not the Red Rising saga as a whole, is only the third entry for both of these. In fact Morning Star isn’t even the halfway point of this saga as Darrow’s story continues in 4 further books and I can’t say I’m excited to read these. There were plot threads which could be picked up in a fourth entry but they are not threads I would consider necessary to resolve and the partially open nature and ambivalence of the ending played to its strengths in my opinion.