3.5 Stars 
 Red Rising is like the Hunger Games meets Divergent meets The Red Queen. I think that the YA dystopian world has been done so often now it's hard to have anything original these days. 
 This world is set sometime in the distant future, where we have colonised other planets. It's all very spacey and futuristic. At the start of the novel the main character, Darrow, is mining Mars for a metal, mineral, thing that makes planets habitable. The conditions are awful and slave like but they think they're necessary, for the good of mankind so one day everyone can come to Mars. It turns out that everyone is already there. 
 The Divergent and Red Queen aspect comes in when it turns out that everyone is classed into demographics by colours (Red Queen) the bottom of the pecking order are the Reds (Darrow) in the mines the top are the golds. The class of people also only do one kind of job (Divergent) like all Reds mine and Pinks are for pleasure. The Golds rule. 
 Darrow ends up infiltrating the Golds in an attempt to free the Reds from slavery and get his vengeance for all the deaths of his family (same old same old). Darrow is made into a gold and is sent to an academy where he has to pass the first year, which is a big role playing game where all the students have to try to conquer and enslave each other (VERY Hunger Games). 
 The main reason I liked this is the main character, Darrow, has a very clear voice. He's a nice character and has great development. His relationship with Eo was very sweet. He reminds me ALOT of Todd from the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness. 
 Overall, an enjoyable read AND quite funny. I actually laughed out loud at some points.