Dark Age - Pierce Brown

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⭐8/10

I have given basically every book of Red Rising the same score, and while I think this is maybe the best one it also took me 6 months to read. It is massive, it is dense, and when I finally got some momentum on it earlier this year I finally finished it.

This is book 5, the second book of the second trilogy, and it is very much the Empire Strikes Back of this second arc. Things are indeed dark, and it goes out of its way to be as gnarly as possible. But let me take a step back. The first third of this book is a siege of a planet told from two perspectives. It is pretty incredible, the scale is massive, but even 5 books in I can barely keep track of going on. I've read these books over too long of a span, and when character names are mentioned I know they are significant but I can't remember why, or what their allegiance currently is. There are a million moments in this book that I'm sure would hit harder on re-read, but the universe is so big, the names so weirdly obscure but also similar. Even places and things, so many words come up that I need to actively think about to remember what they are. I have to check the wiki online constantly, and that really takes you out, especially when you read a characters backstory and have zero memory of it.

I will have a review for Dune Messiah soon as well, which I think suffers from some of the same things, but that book is smaller, and I will talk more about it there. There are many thematic similarities between the two actually, and emperor contemplating their power and the violence the wreak on the galaxy. But Dune or even something like Foundation has a grand scope with scenes across years that are more general. This is specific actions and events of individuals in a war whose scope is impossible to imagine but also seems to only involve the 50 or so named characters?  I just found huge parts of this book confusing, including the choreography of fight scenes and the ever shifting allegiances. Every time an army shows up magically I just don't understand the logistics and my eyes kind of glaze over.

Still, there are some amazing moments, and after every one of these books I am ready to jump into the next one. This second trilogy introduced two new characters that are easy to love and easy to follow, since there isn't back story I am missing, and they both get a lot to do here. I can think of so many really cool fights or moments, but all are tainted by the feeling of not totally understanding the ramifications, or the history that brought us to those moments.

I'm going to try to read the next one sooner that the gap I took before this one, but no promises! Like another book I am reading, once I get going it is rewarding, but cracking it open is intimidating.

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