Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard Book Review

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

“You want me to pin my entire operation, the entire revolution, on some teenaged love story?”

Mare’s just an average Red girl until the day she gets a job working for the Silver’s in the Silver Palace and during the Queenstrial discovers she has powers linked to electricity. However only Silvers have powers so to cover for her the King and Queen force Mare into being Mareena Titanos, a Silver from a long lost family, and she’s engaged to the second Prince.   

This book took me a long long time to read mainly because Mare was an annoying main character. Having read a lot of YA novels you get used to reading books with the main lead being special but this book focused too much on Mare and everything that happened seemed to have her at the centre of it. Personally I think the book would have suited having dual perspectives.

The plot wasn’t bad it just moved really slowly. There was a lot of focus on Mare’s character pre discovering her powers and this included the introduction of the rebellion group ‘Scarlet Guard’. Typically the rebellion is shown after the main character is with the opposition but by introducing it earlier it made the story predictable and solely focused on Mare’s actions.  But the thing is what did Mare actually do for the rebellion group before the Ball.

The romance in this book is really awkward which is natural when there are 3 love interests. The heir to the throne, Cal is the one who saves Mare and I know he’s supposed to be someone conflicted on the right thing to do but his character at the start is way different to him later on…his opinion changes and his character is contradictory. The next love interest is the one which is predictable, Kilorn her best friend. Following the stereotype he’s in love with her and she doesn’t see it but protects him all the same. Lastly the 3^rd love interest is Cal’s brother and her fiancé Maven, the perfect prince.

There’s this major ‘twist’ near the end of the book but to be honest all the signs pointing towards it were in the book. The way that Mare describes Maven as a better King than Cal, what Julian says, how he’s the Queen’s son and how he’s presented as too perfect. Other aspects I didn’t like was how she knew all the bad stuff on Cal and yet she still went to him and hated Evangeline for being with him and how although there was a lot of death, no major character died.

What I did like though is the ending action scene it was well written but then the ending with the discovery of something was too cheesy.

★☆☆☆☆