Iron Gold

Hey guys!

Here I am once more, writing you and this time I am completely heart broken. I am heartbroken because I have just finished one of the best books I have ever read and even when I know that I a few months I will have another book in the series I don’t know if I will be able to be taken away from this world for such a long time.

In case you don’t know this, I am a huge fan of Pierce Brown and I was very much looking forward to reading his next book. I was hoping it will be something completely different from the Red Rising trilogy, but I was pleasantly surprised when I learned he was writing at least three more books in this series.

Iron Gold takes place 10 years after all the original trilogy, so if you haven’t read that one yet I will recommend for you to read my review of Red Rising, Golden Son or Morning Star instead of this one. This will be a spoiler free review but, as it takes place after what happened in Morning Star for sure you will be spoiled for that one if you keep reading. I have warned you.

So, as I was just saying., 10 years have passed since Darrow, Mustang, Sevro and the rest of the gang defeated Society and created the Republic. However, this 10 years have not been exactly peaceful. There are a lot of open fronts and not everyone is happy with what the new government have built. Not everything that was promised as delivered and there are still corruption happening.

I was extremely happy going into this book. I don’t know if it was because I was extremely excited about the book or if it was because it was that good, but I remember reading the prologue with goosebumps. And actually, thought out the entire book there were many scenes that make me have goosebumps. I like the number of powerful scenes that there were in this book. Specially because the power of those scenes does not arise from a battle it comes from the solemnity of those scenes.

The writing was amazing as it was in the other books in the series. I think that Pierce Brown was “brave” considering that he kind of changes the narrating structure he used and worked so well for him in the first books. In this book we have 4 different narrators, all told in the first person and surprisingly all can be easily differentiated from each other.

The first of the narrators is Darrow. We already know him, and he brings that familiarity to the narration. The fact that he is no longer the only protagonist might have ended up with him feeling flat or something but no. I keep loving reading from Darrow perspective as much as I did the first time I read from him in Red Rising. I like him as character because he does a lot of shit (sorry for the expression) but, all that he does is to protect those who he loves or to do what he thinks is right. I am not defending his actions, because I feel like still he is too focus on war and he has yet to realise that he is no longer in his 20s´ and has a family to take care of.

The second narrator is Lyra. She is a red and I really like her, she had a very taught life and still she is enduring a lot. I love how things can change when they are told from different people and I think that is something that Pierce Brown did in a marvellous way in this book. In Red Rising we are told that the Gamma are the “privileged” red, of course, when we are told that we are following Darrow´s perspective whereas here we are following a red gamma and thing might have not been as smoothly as we all thought for them.

Lyssander the grandson of Octavia is the third narrator and I think that he is the one that I have enjoyed the most. When we first meet him he was a kid, barely 10. Now he is a man and he has been living in the shadow with the man who murdered his last living relative. Yeah it´st true that at the end Cassius saved his life, but still it might have been hard in the boy. What I have enjoyed about the part that were told from his perspective was the whole dilemma he is constantly having. Not rely knowing how to do what he thinks is right.

The final narrator is Ephrain and he is a grey that lost his fiancé during the war. I also really enjoyed reading from his perspective as he is so morally ambiguous. He is selfish but at the same time you can see that in some level he cares for the people around him. I did not necessarily like him, for sure I would not be friends with someone like him, but I can value the great work that is after this character and of course it was a very entertaining perspective to read form.

I found this change in narrators extremely interesting and I think it works perfectly for the expansion of the universe that the author is trying to do. In the first trilogy we had a world that was built, and we understand it but at the end of Morning Star that world is destroy so when we enter this book we need the world to be built for us again and if there is something that I consider Pierce Brow to be excelled at is the world building.

It was a brave decision, to destroy everything he have already created and turned into something entirely new but with the reminiscent of the old. This book was slower than Golden Son and Morning Star because we need to understand how this new world is working and what are the consequences of what happened. That consequences make the universe to be divided in three various parts, so it´s like the author is expanding what he already created and at the same time he is rebuilding what was destroyed.

The plot was very well carried. The plot twists came in the right moments and even when a couple of them were kind of predictable, at least for me, they were done elegantly.

My only complaint is that I missed Mustang as a narrator. I feel like she is such an interesting character and it annoys me that she is constantly relegated to a secondary part. I also would like to see how it´s to be on Servo’s mind.

I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars because it´s truly amazing and I highly recommend for all of you to picked up.

See you all next Monday.