Morning Star, by Pierce Brown

Clara’s Verdict

Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords hanged his wife and enslaved his people, and by the opening of Morning Star every disguise has been spent and every rank climbed: the patient infiltration of Gold society is over, and the only move left is revolution. Pierce Brown finally gives the uprising its full stage, and the hierarchy is torn apart from within, exactly as Darrow always swore it would be.

My verdict: this is the pay-off volume, and it pays. The moral weight comes from where devotion to honour and hunger for vengeance collide, and from the enemies Darrow once counted as friends. At 21 hours and 50 minutes it is a genuine commitment, and the intensity rarely relents; anyone who prefers their science fiction cool and cerebral should know this one runs at furnace temperature.

What This Edition Is and Who It’s For

Morning Star is the third instalment of Red Rising, released by Recorded Books on 9 February 2016. The premise is stated with brutal economy: Darrow has battled through Society’s cutthroat rivalries, climbed the ranks and waited patiently, and now the time has come to inspire those shackled in darkness to break their chains and unmake the world their cruel masters built.

It is emphatically not a jumping-on point. The betrayals only wound if you watched the friendships form, and a destiny too long denied means little unless you have followed the denying. Arrive in order, though, and you collect the reward serialised epics exist to deliver: consequences with two books of momentum behind them, resolved across nearly twenty-two hours.

Tim Gerard Reynolds Carries the Rising

Tim Gerard Reynolds narrates, and this is material built for a performer with range and stamina in equal measure. Darrow’s first-person voice must hold grief, fury, guile and battlefield command inside one throat, often within a single chapter, and Reynolds has almost a full day of audio in which to do it.

What a performance of this scale must bring, above all, is momentum. War narratives in audio can collapse into noise; the craft lies in keeping each confrontation personal, each loss named, and the quiet chapters as charged as the loud ones. Given how much of Morning Star turns on oaths, speeches and reunions with enemies who used to be friends, a narrator’s sense of occasion matters as much as his action delivery, and this structure hands him occasions to burn.

What Readers Say

No written listener reviews have attached themselves to this edition yet, so the honest report is numerical: 4.7 from 57 ratings. For the resolution of an arc this size, that figure is telling, because pay-off volumes are traditionally where disappointed fans take their revenge. A 4.7 says the landing held. I will not dress the number up further; it speaks plainly enough on its own.

Who Should Listen?

Listen if you have finished the first two books and want the revolution you were promised, delivered at scale: science fiction in which the politics are personal, the battles have names in them, and heroes pay real costs. Listeners who like their epics operatic will be entirely at home.

Skip it if you are new to the series, pressed for time, or weary of war stories: twenty-two hours of reckoning is the whole point, and there is no light version of it. For everyone who has climbed this far with Darrow, the summit is worth the air.