This was taken from a longer post at my blog, https://myliterarylifestyle.wordpress... 
 Red Queen is a thoroughly unremarkable novel where the only thing of note about it is how it came to be and the fact that it's a fantastic illustration of why people think YA novels are beneath adult reading. 
 The novel is absolutely unoriginal. There is nothing - nothing - in the narrative that is original. The novel and its plot exists of a series of tropes from other (better) YA novels. There are, of course, no actual original stories so this should not be a problem. In this case, however, Suzanne Collins should probably be looking into how she can collect royalties from this series. Additionally, the problem is that there's nothing particular interesting about how the plot or the novel plays out. The prose is a bit less than workman in quality and the characterization (including that of the protagonist) is non-existent, which is more than a little problematic. 
 For the, the pacing is also kind of awful. The book is quick and easy to get through at a quick clip but the events move a bit too fast. It's not realistic, conceivable or sensible. Mare's becoming the face of the revolution doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense; not in the way Katinss becoming the face of the revolution worked in The Hunger Games. She doesn't actually become the rebel's Mockingjay until the second of the series while Mare is declared to be the face nowhere close to the end of the first book. It's too fast and it's unearned and it just doesn't work for me. The worldbuilding, honestly, is even worse. 
 To make matters worse for me, there's insta-love combined with a love triangle and neither are handled particularly well. It's like my own special brand of hell. Cal and Mare fall for each other far, far, far too quickly for it even to make a lick of sense. There's too much feeling, far too soon. And none of these characters have any real weight behind them - every single one of them, from the main character best friend, to the love object, to the villain, to the leader of the resistance, to the older, wiser mentor, is simply designed to fill a role. Not one piece of them feels hardy and whole. I also can't feel the character's motivations - they just don't seem to have been considered. It's like they just do things for the sake of those things needing to be done. While reading Red Queen, I kept thinking, "This was in The Hunger Games and it was done so much better there." 
 And honestly, if you didn't see that plot twist coming, you haven't read enough books. That so called twist was telegraphed from the moment Mare met the royals. 
 So much of Red Queen feels like a points checked off a list - like someone just looked at the trends of whatever YA was selling like hotcakes, made a list of what features it had and then just treated these things like bullet points to hit, rather than specific story beats/character arcs that needed to be nuanced into being. 
 To me, it also highlights one of the reasons people tend to look askance at adults who like YA: it's just so damn juvenile and underdeveloped and yet, so very, very popular that it makes YA in general look bad. And that's incredibly unfair to lots of truly wonderful books and very talented authors. 
 It's rare that I don't continue with a book series. I'm one of those freaks that usually has to continue til the bitter end. Divergent, another YA series I disliked, is probably the most series I didn't finish. At least there, though I made it to the end of book 2. Red Queen? I'm not even gonna crack open the sequel. I just don't have the time to waste when there's so many books out there, waiting to be read.