Summary: Glass Sword

The GIST

Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard is the second book in the bestselling Red Queen series, and it begins at a sprint, in the very moments after the first book ends. In the kingdom of Norta, blood decides everything. Silvers have superhuman abilities and rule; Reds have none and serve. Mare Barrow is the girl who broke that rule, a Red whose blood hides a Silver's power: she can make electricity and command lightning. Betrayed by the prince she trusted and hunted by the new king, she now sets out to find others like her before he does.

Aveyard, who studied screenwriting, writes with a film-maker's pace, and this sequel takes the palace intrigue of Red Queen out onto the road: ruined cities, hidden island bases, stolen jets and a prison no one is supposed to escape. But its real subject is quieter and darker. It is about what leading a rebellion does to the person leading it. Mare decides she must become a weapon, and the book's title is her own fear about herself: that she is a sword made of glass, and beginning to crack.

The Story

Mare and Cal, the exiled prince and rightful heir to the throne, have just escaped execution at the hands of Cal's younger brother Maven, now king, and Maven's mother, Queen Elara. They have been pulled to safety by the Scarlet Guard, the underground Red resistance, and are rattling along on an underground train with the Guard's fierce captain, Farley, and Mare's childhood best friend, Kilorn.

There is one more passenger, and he changes everything. Mare's older brother Shade, whom she believed dead, is alive and working with the Guard. And he is like her. Red-blooded, yet gifted with an ability: Shade can teleport. The two of them are what come to be called newbloods, both Red and Silver and stronger than either. Mare knows there are more. She carries a list of their names, given to her by her old teacher, the Silver scholar Julian Jacos. Maven knows about them too, and he means to hunt them down and kill them. Mare's mission is to reach them first.

The train carries them to the ruined city of Naercey, where Maven's army attacks almost at once. Maven appears in person to threaten her, and she slips away, following Farley into a submarine that takes the survivors out to sea. Mare realises that the Scarlet Guard is far bigger than she had ever imagined.

In the cramped quiet of the submarine, the real trouble starts, and it is inside her. Mare no longer knows who she is. After Maven's betrayal she trusts nobody. The Guardsmen around her seem frightened of her, and they despise Cal on sight simply because he is Silver. Things grow worse when they reach the island of Tuck, a hidden Guard base. There a hard man with a blood-red eye, the Colonel, a Guard commander from the Lakelands, the northern country at war with Norta, has Cal thrown into a cell despite Mare's protests that he is on their side.

Tuck is also where Mare's family now lives as refugees: her mother and father, her brothers Bree and Tramy, her sister Gisa. The reunion is tense. They do not know what she has been through or what she has done to survive, and she is afraid they would fear her, even hate her, if they did.

The Colonel has no use for her plan either. He trusts only what he considers true Reds, calls the newbloods freaks, strips Farley of her command and dismisses the rescue mission as a waste of time. So Mare makes her own plan. With Kilorn's help she breaks into the underwater barracks where Cal is held, in a cell lined with Silent Stone, which smothers Silver abilities. And then Kilorn shoves her into the cell and locks the door behind her. For a few stunned minutes Mare believes she has been betrayed by her oldest friend. In fact it is a trick played on the Colonel. Kilorn, Farley and Shade spring the pair of them, and the five escape the island in a stolen jet, a Blackrun.

Now the hunt begins. In the village of Coraunt they find Nix Marsten, tell him what he is, and give him a choice: join the fight against Maven or walk away. Nix blames Cal for the deaths of his daughters and can hardly bear to stand beside him, but he comes. Near the city of Harbor Bay they meet a smuggler named Crance, who leads them through tunnels beneath the city, straight into a trap, before changing sides at the last moment and guiding them out as the tunnels collapse. They break into the city's Security Center for records of more newbloods. But when they reach the next name on the list, they are too late. Maven has been there first, and he is waiting. He turns a device called a sounder on Mare, a weapon that turns her own lightning against her.

She wakes four days later in the Notch, a Guard safe house deep in the wilderness, with new scars and a brand in the shape of an M burned into her skin. From here the rebellion finds its rhythm. For weeks Mare flies recruiting missions all over Norta, pulling newbloods out of Maven's reach, among them Ada Wallace, while at the Notch she and Cal train the recruits to fight and to master their abilities.

Maven does not let her go. He leaves notes for her along the way, taunting her and demanding that she return to him. Mare will not give in, but she secretly keeps the notes, because part of her still misses the boy he once pretended to be. Alone with Cal, she is torn between drawing close to him and pushing him away. She has decided that to destroy Maven and Elara she must become a weapon, and she fears she is "a sword made of glass" that is "beginning to shatter."

Then, in an abandoned mining village, the team meets Jon, a strange newblood who can see the future. He will not join them. He does tell them about Corros Prison, where Maven holds captured newbloods and Silvers who have defied him, Julian among them, and he warns that Queen Elara will turn those newbloods into weapons of her own unless someone stops her. He also sends Mare to a lake to find something she will need. What she finds there is a person: Cameron Cole, a newblood who has just escaped Corros herself, with the power to silence the abilities of others. Cameron wants nothing to do with Mare. Her twin brother has been conscripted into a legion of thousands of Red children that Maven has ordered to the front lines at the Choke, a certain death sentence, and she means to save him. Mare forces her to come along anyway. Cameron's accusation stings because it lands: that Mare cares more for special newbloods than for ordinary Reds.

Three days later, Mare, Cal, Shade, Kilorn, Farley, Cameron and a band of newbloods set out to break into the prison. What it costs them, and how far Maven will go to get Mare back, is the business of the book's final act, which ends on a cliffhanger that changes the course of the series.

What It's Really About

On its surface this is a story of rebellion against a rigid class system, with the Silvers' abilities standing in for every kind of inherited power. Underneath, it is a study of what power and war do to a person. Mare starts the book as a survivor and spends it becoming a commander, and the change frightens the people who love her. She grows colder. She makes decisions that could cost lives, overrides people's choices, and catches herself doing things she would once have found unthinkable. The line between hero and monster, which seemed so clear when the enemy was a palace, starts to blur.

Trust and betrayal run through every chapter. Maven's treachery has left Mare unable to take anyone at face value, and the story keeps testing her: a best friend who seems to turn on her and has not, a smuggler who does turn on her and then turns back, a Colonel who is on her side and yet against her. Loyalty arrives from unexpected directions and so does treachery, and Mare has to learn to tell them apart by what people do.

Prejudice turns out not to belong to the Silvers alone. The Guard distrusts Cal for his blood. The Colonel scorns newbloods as freaks. Nix cannot forgive a Silver prince. And Cameron forces Mare to ask whether she has built a hierarchy of her own, with the gifted at the top. The newbloods complicate a world that used to come in two colours.

Finally there is the pull between love and duty. Mare stands between two brothers: Cal, the soldier prince weighed down by guilt, and Maven, whose hold on her has curdled into obsession and who is still, somehow, not easy to hate. Readers come for the fast pace, the battles and the ever-growing cast of characters with strange abilities, and they stay for a heroine who is allowed to be flawed, frightened and sometimes wrong.

Who Should Read It

This is for readers of young adult fantasy and dystopian fiction who like a strong, complicated heroine and stakes that keep rising: fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent and Throne of Glass will feel at home. It should be read after Red Queen, since it picks up exactly where that book stops. Those who enjoy stories about rebellion, identity and the weight of leadership, and who do not mind a darker middle chapter that ends by leaving them desperate for the next volume, will race through it.

This has been a summary of Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.