Reviews with content warning for Child death - Dark Age

Spoilers ahead! This is going to be a long, detailed review as I have visceral negative feelings about this book and author. If you love this book or don’t want spoilers, click away. You’ve been warned.

Overall, I found the writing to be sloppy. It suffers from having far too many characters, gratuitous violence, lack of constraints grounding the world, unbelievable plot twists, lack of a cohesive plot, homophobia, misogyny, and an author’s disregard for his readers. Pierce Brown managed to take a formula that worked for him in the first trilogy and bastardized it to the point that it feels like a cheapened, hollow imitation of its former self.

Getting into the specifics:

1. Overly Swollen Character List
Each new character has a gaggle of other unimportant side characters to digest. Take a gander at the Dramatis Personae page, then realize the low-level side characters aren’t even listed there. Woof. Why so many characters? Oh, just so Brown can butcher them. Trying to understand who new characters were and their dynamics became a chore. If you devoted any significant mental energy to keeping everyone straight, you’re rewarded by realizing so many of them are dead by the end and thus all that energy to keep everyone straight was ultimately pointless.

2. Gratuitous Gore and Violence
There was gore, rape, torture, genocide, cannibalism, nailing a newborn baby to a tree, a lot of butchered horses, and not one but two separate cases of pedophilia. Look, I was girded for this book to be brutal. I’m not a sensitive person to this stuff, but this level of depraved gratuitous violence just for violence’s sake was just lazy. I’ve read books like The Poppy War series and Manacled with similar war violence and they were some of my favorite books. Not because of the violence but because the violence was contextualized. If an author takes the time to reflect and make you realize why these violence scenes are necessary for plot, theme, or a wider moral message, it can be quite poignant. This, however, felt like the violence was there only for shock value as due reflection was often glanced over if undertaken at all. The graphic violence is also unceasing to the point that it was all so absurd and overdone by the end.

3. Unmooring Known Constraints in the Book’s World
When long-dead characters come back from the grave for cheap plot twists, it begs the question of what is actually at stake in this world? Think about it. In this world, healing is extremely easy and dead characters are now coming back to life. They can engineer fantastical creatures and impossible to kill monsters. They can terraform planets, control weather, and travel impossibly far in space. Characters will accomplish unbelievable levels of education, cunning, and war training off the page. Darrow is such an overpowered hero that anything’s possible to him while simultaneously any mishap feels almost unbelievable because he’s so perfect. There’s a balance between creating an interesting sci-fi fantasy world and anchoring it with limits such as physics, biology, strength, time, death, politics, resources, the limits of the human mind and body, etc. This lost that balance. Anything seems possible, so any character growth or accomplishment feels cheap, unearned, and hollow. Brown has figuratively unmoored the series from the laws of gravity such that it feels adrift out in space.

4. Believability
The big plot twist was a lazy, reused idea. He resurrected the Jackal as a 10-year-old clone, who then successfully takes over the Republic government with a coup. Sigh. Here’s a running list of characters in the series who actually died or were written to seem dead to other characters and/or the reader: Darrow, Virginia, Sevro, Cassius, and the Jackal. Learn a new trick, boyo. The Jackal plot twist was all so unbelievably absurd. Laughably absurd. It was such a gross betrayal of his readers that it felt to me like the last season of Game of Thrones.

The Jackal coup wasn’t the only unbelievably absurd plot twist, but let’s start our examination there. Tell me how a 10-year-old clone boy can make an underground crime network, dupe a senator, then stage a coup inside the Senate chamber? This same boy was outsmarted and out gunned previously as an adult and is described as being less cunning as a boy repeatedly by Virginia during their interactions. Yet he somehow orchestrated this unbelievable coup? The way the coup played out as well was just done for shock value alone and was lazy as it wasn’t grounded in how historical coups have transpired. Imagine the whole of the US Congress and President are overthrown by a ten-year-old boy’s plotting. Even with the historically incompetent US political system we now have, that wouldn’t be conceivable even in the most low-budget Hollywood film.

Sefi is also overthrown in a coup that felt comically absurd. He built up the Obsidians as the most brutal of all the classes then Sefi just sits there as two men babble on and on and tell her they’re about to overthrow her. Instead of just shooting either of them, she sits there like a dumb log. Again, this happened only for shock value, not believability. It also threw out the whole moral arc of the Obsidian class in such a lazy and unsatisfying way, which challenges the central premise of the series. If the Obsidians can learn peace and cooperation only to descend back to war and committing genocide, then why is Darrow even trying to free all the races from the Golds? Doesn’t that just play into everything the Gold’s preach? Sigh. It was just done for shock value without consideration to how it tied in with the overarching plot and theme of the series.

Cassius comes back from the dead after being absent the entire book and miraculously rescues Darrow at the end. Again, unbelievable and all too convenient a twist. Then let’s unpack how unbelievable Lysander’s story was. First, he somehow survives a storm killing everyone else and a desert known to kill virtually all who get stranded. Then he somehow gets rescued in disguise by Darrow’s side, gets into the city where Darrow’s side is virtually under siege, gets discovered but escapes to run/fly across the city in plain sight without getting killed as all of Darrow’s forces pursue him, works with someone else to use Darrow’s own EMP to wipe out their tech (so their transport and weapons), then rallies the city against Darrow’s side to attack him. One man did this all by himself. Yup. And you’re telling me that the people who are getting called slaves are going to rally to the slavers? Again, unbelievable.

Repeatedly, sides which were on their last leg or dead suddenly come back and miraculously out maneuver characters with established political and physical prowess. Again unbelievable. Brown gets so caught up in catching the reader off guard with unforeseen plot twists that they end up feeling tired, cheap, and laughable by a certain point. I love a good plot twist, but you have to have it moored in reality.

5. Plot
Some previous points tie in here. The plot was all over the place. It’s a swollen 800ish pages, half of which felt unnecessary. You could cut out Lyria’s perspective entirely and wouldn’t lose anything but the shock value of what she witnessed which honestly wasn’t needed to advance any other character arcs (we already know Victra is primed for vengeance). Harmony was already known to be vile and we didn’t need to see her Red Hand faction being more heinous. Lysander’s perspective was also unnecessary. Being inside his head was also insufferable. Ephraim gets butchered after all that time spent redeeming himself. The fight scenes were generally well written, but often lasted too long and were too numerous. These action scenes were also juxtaposed against chapters that dragged such that you’d get whiplashed by: Action! Drag. Action! Drag (ad nauseum). And what is the plot? The only things of substance that happened were: Virginia and the Republic are overthrown, Sefi is overthrown, Darrow is booted off Mercury. All the other plot points introduced didn’t complement the main plot, but rather further cheapened it and made it drag.

6. Homophobia
Brown has let his own biases color the writing. It’s become its own trope for male sci-fi/fantasy authors to slip in misogyny and homophobia. Brown has repeatedly let me down here. I gave him a pass in the first book because he was a new author, it was published 10 years ago, and he likely had less editorial support. The issue is, I can’t keep blindly giving this man a pass. The language he uses and the treatment of the female and queer characters is not just unfortunate, it’s harmful. We'll come back to the mysogyny in the next section.

I've touched on the homophobic language he uses in previous reviews. The list of terms used in the series include "pricklicker," "buttboy," and "cock suckers" to name the most egregious. The term "pixie" Brown invented is also used as a pejorative for characters who are either materialistic or acting vain, hedonistic, or effeminate. Oscar Wilde was often derided as a "dandy" in his day and was famously jailed for being a gay author who liked the finer things in life. It's difficult not to see the term "pixie" in the same light as the term "dandy," which was used against Oscar Wilde in the media's portrayal of him during and after his trial. With the term pixie, you can substitute any gay slur (faerie, sissy, pansy, the f-slur) and the context of the sentence would remain unchanged. In Dark Age, there was also a scene where the word catamite is used repeatedly as a pejorative-another example of Brown introducing homophobic language. And it’s not just the villains who use this language, it’s even the characters such as Sevro and Darrow who are written to be respected and loved. The language you use in a series about fighting tyranny and oppression shouldn't marginalize your minority readers.

This book ruined Sevro for me because of his homophobic language. Let’s deconstruct that scene. Mustang catches the crime boss responsible for abducting her son and Sevro’s daughter and captures the man’s memories. She believes Dancer was involved because of the contents of the memory. Sevro and Mustang confront Dancer by showing him the memory, which shows Dancer having adult relations with this crime boss. We didn’t know Dancer was queer so he’s forcibly outed. What plays out is a tense scene where Sevro makes fun of Dancer’s sexuality with the pejorative language you’d expect from a cringy straight guy. Dancer thinks they’re trying to blackmail him for his sexuality. Mustang and Sevro then find out Dancer had no idea the man was a crime boss and that Dancer wasn’t connected to the abduction. Sevro apologizes but it’s while they’re trying to convince Dancer to rally his Senate faction to vote for something Sevro and Virginia want so the apology feels opportunistic and fake. Dancer tells them how hiding his sexuality was deeply emotional for him, but they’re all ultimately good with each other after talking and Dancer agrees to help them in the vote. They then go to the Senate. As Dancer is about to commit his support for Mustang’s cause, he’s brutally killed and a coup transpires. Really? REALLY? You torture this man by making fun of his sexuality, forcibly out him, make him think his sexuality is being used against him, make him think everything is okay, then not only brutally kill him but symbolically take away his voice the way you killed him.

Then Brown does it again with Ephraim, the only other significant queer male character. Ephraim is forced to watch Sefi be butchered then has his heart brutally ripped out. The man already had his heart figuratively ripped out when his husband died (also killed by this author). This book lost me before this part but that was the final nail in the coffin.

For those who would argue it’s a war series and characters die, let’s also examine this author’s history with his queer male characters. Every queer male is portrayed as creepily hitting on Darrow (Tactus), a villain (Tactus, Duke of Hands), deceitful (Duke of Hands, Ephraim, Roque), sexually promiscuous (Quicksilver, Matteo), overly materialistic (Quicksilver, Matteo), a drug addict (Ephraim), or killed off (ALL but Quicksilver and Matteo).

I will be generous and say that writing characters in such a large world and trying to give representation to groups you’re not a part of is always a hard undertaking. It can be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing. But you don’t want to reinforce stereotypes, use language which has historically been weaponized against these groups, or repeatedly subject almost all in the group to death or torture. You also put yourself under the microscope even more when your series is about fighting oppression. Brown did more harm with his queer representation than good, unfortunately. It's also hard to see this pattern and not wonder if it was done not in ignorance, but with malevolent intent.

7. Misogyny
As for misogyny, this series is rife with it. You only have to look at the bro banter between the men or what the women are subjected to. I was delighted to see Virginia get her own chapters and generally enjoyed them. Then Brown brutalized her. I liked Sefi and he brutalized her in the dirtiest way. Lyria had an interesting arc then is brutalized by…seeing other women brutalized. She helps Victra give birth in a cringey scene that felt very much like a man describing birth. Then Vicra and Volga are taken, tortured, and Victra’s day-old baby is nailed to a tree. Lyria discovers in the town that a Handmaid’s Tale-esque program is forcing women to be raped and used as broodmares. Except Brown makes it little girls because he always has to do the most. I can give him a pass for having some brutal things happen to a few of the female characters. It’s war. But do all of them need to be so brutalized? And the brutality didn’t even have a purpose most of the time. Treating your female characters again and again this way establishes a pattern that cannot be overlooked.

8. Disregard for the Reader
Part of writing a good book is being able to elicit the breadth of human emotions in your reader. Sometimes bad things have to happen to do this. But there is a balance such that you don’t come across as an author who has a total disregard for the reader. Brown really just flipped us the bird with this one and said, “I know you’ll keep buying my books anyways.” This book was overall tainted with the fact that everything in it was unsatisfying and left us with no sense of hope. Doing this as an author shows a disregard for the reader that breaks their trust in you to pen the story. Authors often must emotionally manipulate readers to give us a good story. Great authors make you love the manipulation. Good authors make you tolerate it. Bad authors make you realize they weren’t a safe person to trust with your emotions. Pierce Brown is the latter. I don’t trust him to execute the theme of the series-fighting tyranny and oppression-properly. I don’t trust him as a queer man to represent me in this series or this world. So why would I want to continue on? There are plenty more qualified authors who tell the stories with the same theme better.

Content Warnings

mspringer7122's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

hkuhlman7's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This one goes crazy

Content Warnings

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