Book Review: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

I’m a fan of The Hunger Series, The Mortal Instruments Series and The Divergent Series….thanks to Victoria Aveyard’s debut series I have a combination of all the above. Due to the responsibilities of life, I usually can finish a book in a week—not this week. By chapter three of the Red Queen I threw heed to the wind (and all responsibilities!) and read all day and night to finish this book. From the nasty trenches of the ‘Stilts’ where our young protagonist, Mare Barrow, lives and her family is trying to survive, I was entranced. She is a member of the Reds; a group of impoverished slaves fighting for the eilte Silvers. She is a pickpocket lacking any skills to get her out of going to war—conscription as it is called in our story. Her father lost a leg and a lung from the war; her three older brothers were conscripted at age 18 and went to the war front to continue fighting for the Silvers. Her younger sister, Gisa, is an amazing seamstress who is saved from conscription due to her talent. Kilorn, her friend, was safe from conscription as he was apprenticed to a fisherman. As fate would have it, Kilorn loses his apprenticeship, leaving Mare to beg his freedom from Farley, a woman in charge of the Scarlet Guard—a secret group determined to fight for the freedom of the Reds. The characters are larger than life and hooked me!

Mare goes out to procure the funds for Kilorn’s freedom when she pickpockets a young man who catchers her in the act. This short encounter leads Mare to a job being a servant girl at the Palace- forever changing her destiny! During Queenstrial, a long standing tradition for Silvers to determine who will be the next queen, Mare is serving the elite when the floor shifts, and she falls to her assumed death on electrical wires. BUT she doesn’t! To her amazement, and the shock of the watching Silvers, she consumes the electricity making her all powerful. A Red cannot have powers! Only the elite Silvers can have unique powers and this low-life Red has shown she also has them. The King and Queen must explain this phenomenon and create an alias for Mare; she is the long lost Princess, Mareena Titanos to whom will be betrothed to Maven, one of the Silver Princes.  Mare is given a gift. She is now to be a Princess in the Silver family with power and fame: giving her inside secrets to help the Scarlet Guard overcome the Silvers.