REVIEW: Blood Red Road by Moira Young

70. Blood Red Road by Moira Young
Publication: Margaret K. McElderry (June 7, 2011), Hardcover, 464pp / ISBN 1442429984
Genre: YA Sci-fi/Fantasy, Dystopian

Read: July 9, 2011
Source: Contest win

Summary from Amazon:

Saba has spent her whole life in Silverlake, a dried-up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms. The Wrecker civilization has long been destroyed, leaving only landfills for Saba and her family to scavenge from. That’s fine by her, as long as her beloved twin brother Lugh is around. But when a monster sandstorm arrives, along with four cloaked horsemen, Saba’s world is shattered. Lugh is captured, and Saba embarks on an epic quest to get him back.

Suddenly thrown into the lawless, ugly reality of the world outside of desolate Silverlake, Saba is lost without Lugh to guide her. So perhaps the most surprising thing of all is what Saba learns about herself: she’s a fierce fighter, an unbeatable survivor, and a cunning opponent. And she has the power to take down a corrupt society from the inside. Teamed up with a handsome daredevil named Jack and a gang of girl revolutionaries called the Free Hawks, Saba stages a showdown that will change the course of her own civilization.

Review

I’ve actually sort of gone of dystopian books lately, if only because there’s so many out there and they all kind of resemble each other. Blood Red Road isn’t an exception to that– it’s your typical desert-y Wild West-ish sort of dystopia (filled with white people)– but I still really enjoyed it anyway– probably because women aren’t just automatically regulated to baby-making machines/kitchen slaves, as in so many other dystopias^[1].

In Blood Red Road, all the female characters are either fighters, gang members, or on their way to becoming one or the other. Not a lot of variety, sure, but it was a nice change. I have a secret love for books about girl gangs (I think it may have something to do with my love for Japanese pinky films) and that probably contributed heavily to my love for this book.

Also it’s just really well written.

The style is just different enough to make Blood Red Road stand out from a lot of other dystopian novels while not being so far out there that it’ll turn people off from reading it. It also matches the tone of the story really well, and it fits in with the kind of dystopia depicted. The dystopia in BRR is sort of like a Mad Max one, I think: it’s dusty, it’s dirty, there are mysterious machines left over from pre-dystopian peoples that no one knows how to work, and everyone is really mean. Even the heroes are mean, although never to the point where they become anti-heroes. Saba luckily has some character development where she goes from mean to less-mean, which was good.

An interesting aspect of BRR is that the protagonist is both female and she’s the one who rescues everybody else. The main storyline is like a reverse damsel in distress, which I found really cool. I love that Saba such a strong person/heroine/etc. and yet she can still change throughout the course of the book. She has issues (personality problems, really) and while by the end of the book she hasn’t done a complete 180, she’s changed in a way that I think makes her even stronger than at the beginning of the book.

The author

The only bit I didn’t like was the romantic subplot. Well, I say “subplot” but it nearly took over the main plot a few times in the second half of the book, which I found annoying. I don’t mind a bit of romance in a book, but when it happens at the expense of the rest of the story it does tend to upset me.

I suppose it didn’t help that the romance^[2] was one of those “soulmates at first sight” sort of things^[3]. Yes, there was some waffling back and forth (“I hate you!” “Not as much as I hate you!”) but it was obvious how it was going to end and the pseudo-magical reasoning for it was so boring.^[4]

The pseudo-magical stuff by itself was sort of…weird? I could see how it fit in with the first part of the book, where Saba and Lugh’s father uses his “magic” to cope with the world as he knows it. But anything after that just didn’t feel like it meshed well with the rest of the story, especially since there was all this speculation on whether magic existed or not. If the Magical Romance Necklace worked as it was supposed to, then surely the rest of the magic stuff was true too, right? But it was like some magic stuff worked and some didn’t, and it was never explained and I’m pretty sure that’s some sort of plot hole.

However. Despite my issues with some aspects of the story, I nevertheless truly enjoyed reading Blood Red Road. It’s got a lot of action, some neat characters, a few twists on the typical dystopian society that kept it fresh(-ish), and some really good writing. If you’re into dystopian books then I honestly don’t know why you wouldn’t like this one, and if you haven’t dipped your toe into dystopian fiction yet then this one might be a good book to start with.

Rating

Really liked it.

Buy

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Other reviews

Presenting Lenore: “Despite having read good early reviews, I had a hard time getting into BLOOD RED ROAD. Saba is uneducated and so the book is written in a dialect that I found grating at first. After 50 pages, I was still wondering what all the fuss was about. But then, sometime around Saba’s debut as a cage fighter, I was fully immersed and didn’t put the novel down again until I was finished.”

Rhapsody in Books: “It really could be bigger than Hunger Games, which is about life or death tests that seem relatively tame compared to what Saba goes through. And strong women? Holy cow, you’ve got them here all over the place! However, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, there’s still time enough for love!”

Good Books and Good Wine: “The worldbuilding is intricately detailed, with reasonable and believable influnece on everything from social constructs to the sort of language the characters speak with, which is informal and well, you’ll see why when you read the book.”

Notes

I seriously read BRR all in one day. It moves FAST, and yet the ending was really satisfying. It’s the start of a series (or a trilogy?) but I didn’t feel like the end was a cliffhanger; it’s a comfortable place to stop and wait for the next book.

I’ve been feeling really unhappy with my reviews lately, mostly because they seem to take a really long time to write, and then when I finish one it’s not as good as I wanted it to be. It feels like a soufflé that collapses as soon as you take it out of the oven. I think I need to stop comparing myself to other book reviewers, because I almost always find myself lacking in some essential way that I can’t fix and then I get unhappy and then I don’t want to blog any longer. So no more of that.

Footnotes
1. Not that this doesn’t mean the book can’t be good (The Handmaid’s Tale). But I just feel really dissatisfied books that have a male protagonist and focuses on male problems/perspectives/etc., with the women shoved into the background like a herd of cattle or something. I also feel it’s slightly unbelievable for women to automatically have absolutely NO power anywhere in a (used-to-be-Western) dystopian society, like every single woman is just going to roll over and let men make decisions about everything just because the world is suddenly fucked up. You know? I think a lot of women would fight that. UP

2. I think you all probably know my feelings about romance in action books by now. If you don’t: I almost always hate it. UP

3. Another thing I really hate. UP

4. I guess also I just really want a dystopia with some non-heterosexual characters for once, and I thought for sure Saba would end up with one of the girl gang members she seemed close with. Is that a weird thing to hope for? I don’t really think it is. Dystopian books always seem to ignore people that aren’t straight and white, and I’m getting tired of it. UP