Summary: Red Queen

The GIST

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard is a young adult fantasy set in a kingdom where the colour of your blood decides everything about your life. People with Silver blood have supernatural powers and rule like gods. People with Red blood have none, and serve, starve and die in the Silvers' wars. Into this world steps a seventeen-year-old Red pickpocket named Mare Barrow, who discovers, in front of the entire Silver court, that she has a power of her own, one that should be impossible.

Published in February 2015, it was Aveyard's first novel, and it launched a four-book series that continues with Glass Sword, King's Cage and War Storm. It won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for best debut author, and reviewers reached for big comparisons, with USA Today calling it Aveyard's "own unique Game of Thrones story" and others noting its kinship with The Hunger Games. It matters because it takes familiar ingredients, a rigid class system, a reluctant heroine, a rebellion and two princes, and binds them into a fast, twisting story about power and about how dangerous it is to trust anyone who has it.

The Story

The kingdom of Norta has been at war with its neighbour, the Lakelands, for a hundred years. The Silvers command that war from their palaces. The Reds fight it. Any Red who reaches eighteen without a job or an apprenticeship is conscripted and sent to the front.

Mare Barrow lives in a poor river village called the Stilts with her war-weary father, her mother and her younger sister Gisa. Her three older brothers, Bree, Tramy and Shade, are already away at the front, and of the three it is clever Shade she is closest to and misses most. Gisa is the family's hope: she is a gifted seamstress, apprenticed to sew for Silver customers, and that skill will keep her out of the army. Mare has no such gift, and she is jealous of her sister for it. What she has is quick hands. She steals to help feed her family, and counts the months until her own conscription.

Then her best friend, Kilorn Warren, a fisherman's apprentice, loses his master. With no apprenticeship, he will be conscripted. Mare cannot bear it. Through a contact of hers, a man named Will Whistle, she finds her way to Farley, a hard-edged captain in the Scarlet Guard, a secret movement of Reds fighting for equality with the Silvers. Farley can smuggle Mare and Kilorn out of reach of the army, but the price is two thousand crowns, a sum far beyond anything Mare has ever seen.

Desperate, Mare goes with Gisa to Summerton, the wealthy Silver city where her sister works, intending to steal what she needs. The day goes terribly wrong. News breaks that the Scarlet Guard has bombed a royal palace, the market erupts in panic, and in the confusion Gisa, trying to help her sister, attempts to pick a Silver's pocket. She is caught, and her sewing hand is smashed as punishment. In one moment, the family's future is gone, and Mare knows it is her fault.

That night, sick with guilt, she slips out to a tavern to steal from the customers. She picks the wrong pocket. The young man who catches her does not turn her in. He listens to her story, gives her money to get home, tells her his name is Cal and that he works at the palace, and promises to find her a job there.

He keeps his word in a way Mare could never have imagined. The next day she is summoned to the royal residence known as the Hall of the Sun, and her brothers are released from the army. Cal, it turns out, is no servant. He is Tiberias Calore the Seventh, crown prince of Norta and heir to the throne, born with the Silver power to command fire, as his father the king was before him.

Mare starts her new job on the day of Queenstrial, a spectacle in which the daughters of the great Silver houses display their powers in an arena to compete for the prince's hand. Serving the nobles above the arena, Mare loses her footing and falls toward the electric shield that covers it. It should kill her. Instead, the lightning runs through her and answers to her. She lands in the arena alive and sparking, face to face with Evangeline Samos, a proud and ruthless girl who bends metal with her mind and is the favourite to be Cal's bride. Mare holds her off, and in doing so humiliates her before the whole court. Evangeline will not forget it.

A Red with powers is a threat to everything the Silver order rests upon. If word spreads, the Reds might rise. So the king and his chilling queen, Elara, who can enter and bend other people's minds, choose to hide Mare in plain sight. They announce that she is Mareena Titanos, the long-lost daughter of a dead Silver general, raised by Reds on the war front. And to keep her close, they betroth her to the king's younger son, the quiet, overlooked Prince Maven.

So the thief from the Stilts becomes a princess-in-waiting, living a lie that could cost her life at any slip. She is drilled in etiquette and history and taught to fight alongside Silver nobles' children who would kill her if they knew the truth. She finds one real friend among her teachers: Julian Jacos, the gentle royal librarian, who is Cal's uncle and the brother of the king's dead first wife. Julian helps her learn to control the lightning, and begins quietly to investigate what she is.

Her heart, meanwhile, is going where it should not. Maven is kind to her, shy at first and then more open, a second son who has always lived in his brother's shadow. But it is Cal, her betrothed's brother, promised to Evangeline and destined to rule the very system that crushes her people, whom Mare finds herself falling for.

Then Cal secretly takes her home to say goodbye to her family, and what she learns there changes her course. Two of her brothers are back. Shade is not: she is told he was executed by Silver officers for desertion. Grief turns to fury, and Mare makes her choice. She joins the Scarlet Guard, the "little lightning girl" of the Silver court now a rebel spy at its very centre. She soon finds that she is not the only one there with divided loyalties, and that the Guard's plans are bolder and bloodier than she had bargained for.

From here the story races. There is a plot to strike at the Silver nobility, a discovery by Julian about Mare's blood that means she may not be the only one of her kind, and a growing sense that in this palace everyone is playing a game and nobody is quite who they appear to be. To say more would spoil it. The final chapters turn on betrayals that readers still argue about, and they are best met unwarned.

What It's Really About

At its core, Red Queen is about inequality, and about the stories the powerful tell to justify it. The Silvers believe their blood makes them superior by nature. Mare's existence proves that it does not, which is precisely why she must be disguised, renamed and controlled. The lie the court builds around her is the same lie the kingdom is built on, only smaller.

It is also about identity. Mare is a Red who passes as a Silver and belongs fully to neither. She is used as a symbol by the crown and wanted as a weapon by the rebels, and nearly everyone she meets is trying to win her allegiance for purposes of their own. A large part of her journey is working out who she is when she is neither Mare the thief nor Mareena the lost princess.

Above all, it is a book about trust and betrayal. The love triangle between Mare and the two princes is more than romance; each brother stands for a different answer to the question of whether a rotten system can be changed from inside. And Aveyard does not make rebellion clean. The Scarlet Guard's fight for justice costs innocent lives, and Mare has to decide what she is willing to be responsible for.

Readers love it for its pace and its nerve. Common Sense Media praised its courageous heroine, action-packed plot and romantic possibilities, Kirkus called it an inventive, character-driven twist on tired fantasy trends, and The Guardian gave it four stars. Not everyone was won over: Publishers Weekly felt a strong sense of déjà vu in its similarities to The Hunger Games, and one reviewer called it over-hyped, though still fun. But even the skeptics tend to agree on one thing: the ending leaves you reaching for the next book.

Who Should Read It

Fans of The Hunger Games and other dystopian fantasies who want superpowers, court intrigue and a slow-burning love triangle in one package. It is ideal for teenage readers and for adults who enjoy young adult fiction that moves quickly and does not play safe with its characters. If you like a heroine with quick hands and plenty of courage, a palace full of liars and a twist you will want to talk about, this is a very easy series to fall into.

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