Dark Age Review

Dark Age by Pierce Brown! After Iron Gold, Brown came back with an epic story (If you haven’t read the first four books of Red Rising, read them first then come back)!

The stories of Iron Gold and Dark Age have kinda melded together and I’m having difficulty telling where one ends and the other begins, but Dark Age starts off with a prologue, which I thought rather interesting for the Red Rising saga. So far I’m guessing it’s structured in three parts; Red Rising, Golden Son, and Morning Star as the first part, Iron Gold for the middle and transition book, then Dark Age, Lightbringer, and Red God to be the third and final. We shall see how that theory ages!

In the beginning of the book I REALLY liked the parts when they were on Mercury and preferred Lysander’s and Darrow’s POV’s. Speaking of POV’s, I honestly didn’t much like Ephraim. About the middle part of the book is a straight sprint of just Eph, but towards the end of the book, maybe the last quarter, I started to actually look forward to his POV. I am so happy though, that Brown decided to have a single POV for quite a few chapters and Lyria got the same treatment as well. Once I got to Lyria’s sprint (I guess that’s what I’m calling consecutive chapters 😂), I realized how much I missed the Martian atmosphere of Red Rising’s Institute and craved it whenever it went back to Mercury. I would love to figure out how to world build like Brown does to seamlessly build different atmospheres for planets. I also adored the team that Lyria and Volga made and enjoyed seeing Victra with them.

Back to the beginning of Dark Age and Virginia; I liked being inside her head and getting to understand the workings of her thoughts. Brown has a way of taking a character you love to make you hate them or vice versa; for me specifically, Sevro and Victra.

I cannot stress throughout these reviews just how devastatingly beautiful Red Rising is. It hurts so good 🤣

Now for the end and likely my biggest complaint for Dark Age. The last two chapters, though nice, were lacking. I really, REALLY wanted a cliff hanger, but didn’t really get one, and honestly, I only remember Brown writing one cliffhanger at the end of Golden Son, so going with my theory, maybe Brown will execute some nice parallelism and end of Lightbringer (no spoilers pls 😅).

In the end I still love the Red Rising Saga and specifically Dark Age so that’s I’m giving it a 8/10 🥐

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