DNF @ 40%
I couldn’t finish this one. I tried to get into it and failed miserably. Which surprised me. For one, I almost never DNF books, even if they’re really tearing me down. I could count on one hand the amount of books I’ve picked up and DNFed over the last five years. And two, the synopsis made the book sound like it would be a new instant favourite. I also didn’t want to dislike it. Rise of the Red Hand has representation not found very often in regular reading. But I guess you need more than that.
Olivia Chadha seems like a wonderful person, and if you manage to find the excitement in this book that I couldn’t, that is terrific, and I encourage her to never stop writing. Maybe her next book I’ll like better. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, here’s my review of what I did read.
To make a good dystopia book, some things that always help include an interesting bad guy, a clever concept of rebellion or even small resistance, likable or at least fascinating main characters, and a society whose history helps us draw parallels between our world without getting in the way of the flow. Rise of the Red Hand fails in every category. If you read the blurb for this book, you wouldn’t think that would be the case. The description made me ecstatic to read this, which just makes the disappointment more crushing.
The description calls for a desecrated world, with manipulable tech that pins blame on innocent people for crimes, and an underground rebellion known as The Red Hand bringing the hierarchy to a standstill.
Maybe it picks up later, but the first third of this book is pretty much nothing but a bunch of jargon about the technology of this polluted, poverty-stricken world, most of which we instantly forget because one, it’s too wordy and smarty-pants-detailed, and two, we don’t feel any reason to remember any of it. The storytelling has no soul or personality. The water is acidic, people have spare parts for arms and legs, this all happened after WWIII, we have deals with other planets, there are drones everywhere, there’s a big bad president out wreaking havoc, there are unfair systems…and if when reading that, you started to get a little bored, because it sounded like a terrible society but no different than other dystopias, then that same boredom translated to the book without ever finishing up to get to the good stuff. I wish I could tell you about the characters and their plights and personalities – but there’s nothing to report.
The action may or may not pick up by the halfway point. That’s why I hate DNF-ing books – you really don’t know. But I can’t imagine how good any action could be to justify enduring your way through the first bit.
My grade: Perhaps unfair 0 stars out of 5
William J. McGinn 
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