5 STARS 
 Hic sunt leones. "Here be lions". 
 I honestly feel like I am so blessed to have read so many incredible books this year, but this book, this book, wow - just wow. This is currently front and center in the race for my best book of the year., maybe all time, I don't know. I'm currently in a whirlwind of Golden Son come down. I have no words - but let me try and explain to you why you have to stop what you're doing and immediately start reading Red Rising and Golden Son. 
 I actually just realised that I only gave Red Rising 2.5 stars. How did that happen? I'm not sure. Usually books get worse the more you think about them afterwards. Red Rising has done the opposite for me. I bumped it up to 3.5 stars. It wasn't perfect - but it was mainly the plot for me that killed it, everything else, the characters, the world, the overarching plot of the series was all great. 
 In this book the plot is a never ending roller coaster that never lets you up for air for a second. It is intense from the first page and it keeps you hooked right to the very end - where it then tries to kill you. I can see the comparisons to the Hunger Games for this series. It basically is the Hunger Games but its even more futuristic and set in space. But this book is the better version of the Hunger Games. For the Hunger Games, books 2 and 3 really lost me. I felt like Katniss was always too reluctant, too apathetic to everything, too boring and sullen. The plot and cause was sometimes hard to follow and I just didn't care by the end. I didn't even finish reading Mockingjay. 
 In this book Darrow makes his cause your cause. You are right there with him every step of the way. You can never guess what is going to happen next. Darrow is a smart guy - but all the "bad guys" are just as smart. The twists are unexpected and gut-wrenching. It is on par with Brandon Sanderson level unexpected plot twists and the ending is just a big a cliff hanger as The Well of Ascension. 
 But as with every book, it's the characters that we care about most. If the characters are badly written and developed, we don't really care what happens to them. Brown honestly writes the best characters I've ever read. 
 So few authors get how nuanced a person is... how many layers there are to a person. How who we are and who we want to be are always at war inside ourselves. Pierce Brown gets it and portrays it in such an honest, sometimes heartbreaking, way. It is a feat to get it just right for one character - to get it right for as many as Brown does in this book is magic. He has an insight to the soul of humankind that no other author rivals. The main characters, the secondary characters, even the almost background characters have incredible depth and complexity. 
 I believe that the whole reason we read isn't because we want to know "What happens next ?" but because we need to know "Why, why, why?". We want to know the characters, what motivates them, why are they the way that they are. Pierce keeps you asking this every this, every moment more breathless and desperate than the last. 
 War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men....You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it. 
 Finally, there is always an argument of morality weaved through a book. Right v Wrong, Good v Evil. But this book takes it to a whole other level. What is good? What is evil? Even though its set in deep space thousands of years in the future the questions it poses are so relevant to humans today. About the path we're on, and where it could be leading us. The symbolism is so profound you find yourself wanting Brown to make it all OK - show us we can be redeemed, make this less confronting to read. He does not let you off easy. It really stays with you after you finish reading it. 
 What do you supposed they would think of us?" I ask. "Of man?" 
 "I suppose they would think we're beautiful, strange, and inexplicably horrible to one another." 
 I really feel like this book and the Chaos Walking Series by Patrick Ness are really on par for quality and themes. If you've read one of these series and not the other I highly recommend you check them out - I'm sure you'll enjoy it!