This week's challenge was to either read Fall or Spring (to celebrate the changing of the seasonal guard 💖) or to read the colors of the world. I had a book on my shelf that immediately fit the bill...Red Queen.
The cover itself drew me in, but it is the story that kept me there.
This is an intriguing book about a kingdom divided between the elite silver bloods and the peasant, impoverished, and conscripted reds. Reading this reminded me of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The False Prince and of stories passed down from the days of the Gladiator games in Rome all rolled into one.
Mare Barrows is on the brink of her eighteen birthday and with that...conscription. She is not apprenticed to anyone and is forced (to her family's shame) to pickpockets and steal trinkets, ration papers, and if she is really lucky...currency. She goes along to get along until her best friend Kilorn's world is upended by the sudden, unexpected death of his master (the fisherman he was apprenticing under) and as such, he is now facing mandatory conscription.
What unfolds is a fast paced story drenched in mystery, intrigue, and treachery. Mare will stop at nothing to protect those that she loves...but what happens when she is the one who most needs protecting? Especially when the one she needs the most protection from is herself?
Quotes that snagged my heart:
"If I fall, if I even slip, I will die. And others will die for my failure." The enormity of the weight she carries is uttered in these seventeen words...the last seven weigh the heaviest on her heart.
"Who would I have chosen? If none of this had happened, if Kilorn's master never died, if _____ hand was never _______, if nothing ever changed. If. It is the worst word in the world." Blanked out two things so that it doesn't give away something that is best read firsthand...but how much of life has been spent asking "if" oftentimes coupled with the word "what"? I can relate to that heartbreak, when you realize you turned a corner (often times it feels like it was turned for you) and you realize there is no going back, all that is left, the only choice you have is to either sit and drown under the weight of "if" or learn to navigate the new normal.
This is book one in what appears to be a four part series.
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