Red Queen (Red Queen, #1)

by Victoria Aveyard

[lessthelonely]

DNFed.

I am writing this “review” – if you can even call it that – the day after I started and DNFed this book. This alone should tell you I didn’t get very far, so if you don’t want to read a review from someone who didn’t finish the book, here’s your cue.

I wanted to like this book. Since I don’t have much to talk about from the book itself, I’m going to tell you how I got. Last year or maybe at the start of this year I read Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, and I loved it. As usually happens, I read the book for free and decided I did want a physical copy.

The hardcover would be too expensive, and I feel like paperback, for a book I’ve already read, wouldn’t be that nice, so I kept putting off buying it. But I did end up buying it in a pre-sale when the rights got bought by a Portuguese publishing house called Saída de Emergência (it means Emergency Exit).

If you want to know the truth, I don’t read books in Portuguese now. I’ve found that most of the time the translation is incredibly lacking. There are exceptions, of course, including of books I have in Portuguese and have only read in Portuguese. Why did I buy a Portuguese version, then? Because well, our paperbacks are incredibly sturdy. They’re also taller than the average international paperback in English, but that’s neither here nor there.

Truth is, I end up enjoying international paperbacks more now, but I still thought I was getting quality by buying in Portuguese. And I do think I got it. The downside of this was that Portuguese paperbacks are fucking expensive. I’m talking a little below 20€, which would be 20.1 dollars.

That is a lot for one book. English paperbacks are incredibly cheaper, specially when you’re like me and you rarely buy books close to their release date. Either way, I bought Iron Widow because it came with a presale gift, which was this book. So now you know I started reading this in Portuguese.

The translation was… iffy to say the least. The truth is I don’t have as much vocabulary in Portuguese, and since English has a lot of verbs, I’m already familiar with the meaning of, stuff gets cloudier in Portuguese. Because we also have a lot of verbs, it’s just a matter of knowing them. But then those appear, and it feels jarring, because in Portuguese I either never heard the word before or I simply don’t think the word fits the text.

Some other problems were that the translator made the text extremely formal. If you want to know: you in English can mean tu (singular) or vós (singular and plural). While vós is correct, it makes the register extremely formal. And it deters from the text when I know this book is YA.

With this, I decided to drop the Portuguese edition and read it in English with my Kindle (for free, once again). And here’s the thing, usually when a book is one I finish, I am invested from the very beginning. Like, maybe I know that I need to read a few pages before the synopsis part of the plot kicks in – in this book, that would be when the MC goes to the Silver’s palace. The Sun something? Don’t remember. The point is: I am interested.

But this book felt bland from the beginning. And here’s why I had very high hopes for this book: it was marketed as a Fantasy Thriller, which is not something you get. This was an incredible mistake and had I known that, maybe I wouldn’t have a physical copy of Iron Widow right now. Here’s why it was marketed as a thriller: I read about 1/8 of the book (got to around page 70), and I got through a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter.

Here's the thing though, I’m calling them cliffhangers to respect what the author very clearly thought would be great moments that made the readers keep going. But only one of the cliffhangers was even remotely surprising. And the thing is, when I know this is book 1 of a series, you may drop all the tension you want, thinking I’m going to fall for it, but I know you’re not going to hurt the protagonist in a way that feels even remotely nail-biting.

Another reason I really wanted to like this book was because Victoria Aveyard’s presence on TikTok is incredibly enticing and fun. And she seems like a great company… but if what I read was meant to be her best work, then I’ll take a chance with some other book(s) by her before I force myself to read this one.

I read 70 pages of what felt like it could’ve happened in half and the thing is I don’t think the book would lose much. As a matter of fact, that would probably make it more of a thriller, because that seems like the only way to get away with predictable happenings – the earlier you get through the predictable reveals, the less confident in their predictions the reader will be. And that results in tension.

Either way, maybe I will keep reading this book at some point, but not now. Those 70 pages were too much filler, not much plot and the reviews I went to see to maybe convince myself to keep going until the end only put the nail in the coffin.

To summarize those: it’s giving not like other girls and love triangle, but the outcome is obvious.