Video review and reading vlog.

I read this for the above project which is the only reason I finished it.

I found this entire thing to be sort of nonsensical, at times deeply boring, super affected, repetitive, and worst of all, deeply misogynistic to the point of rendering the entire experience one of the worst I've had in a while.

To be clear-- even if it weren't misogynistic, it would still be a bad book. It just has the audacity to be bad AND problematic.

I had a hard time following the internal logic of any of this world and particularly of the murder academy Darrow ultimately attends. The world building is so shaky and it isn't helped by a series of events that feel only loosely connected. Why does anything that happens at murder academy even happen? I'm supposed to buy that the elite caste of genetically modified humans interested in preserving their caste and gene pool would just send their children to be murdered by other high caste folks and all for ???????? reasons? Well, I don't buy it, but really the material point is that Pierce Brown doesn't sell it. I don't know how you can make murder school boring, but Brown does.

Darrow has such a weird arc and one I wasn't keen to root for. He is super special and very good at everything, his wife is fridged so he's like "might as well join a rebellion" but then the bulk of this book we see him just participating in the really messed up system he's apparently eventually going to take down. Cool?

Who are the other characters in this book? Um, the murdered wife, the new woman he falls for, the background women to be brutalized and about 100 awful men. If I'm supposed to know anything else about these characters, I don't.

I found the writing so repetitive. We are told the same things over and over. The way that the Golds speak was in fact super grating. It's bad news when you want the book you are reading to shut up.