Exceptional writing saves faddish storyline in ‘Red Queen’

    Four books into the new year and I’ve found a new author’s work to devour: Victoria Aveyard. The downside? She’s only published four books. Granted, she’s younger than I am, so I suppose it’s understandable that she hasn’t written more yet, but that doesn’t make it any easier to come to terms with the fact that I found an author whose voice I adore and I can’t even spend the foreseeable future reading through stacks and stacks of her books. I’ll have to wait to even finish the series I started.
    Truthfully, I almost didn’t  check out “Red Queen” when it was recommended to me at the library. A cursory glance at the cover and synopsis made it seem a bit too familiar, a not terribly original teen dystopia. Think “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” The description of a future Earth populated by “Reds” and “Silvers” made me think of Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” and “Pretties.” As a fantasy series in which a common protagonist is thrust into the world of royalty, it reminded me of “The Lunar Chronicles” by Marissa Meyer.
    But I actually liked all those books well enough, so I figured I’d give this series a shot, too. Let me tell you, I am so glad I did.
    Aveyard is a wordsmith — the kind you don’t find often, especially in the young adult fiction section. The first thing that struck me was the verbs she used. A closing marketplace “deflates;” guilt “ripples” through someone; dehydration “stalks” a village. I was taken by her word choice.
    Throughout the first few chapters, I was reading sentence by sentence, thinking about every great metaphor and beautifully crafted line. Before too long, however, my preconceptions betrayed me, and I found myself transfixed by the story itself. I took it in pages at a time, eager to see where it was going.
    In the world of “Red Queen,” humanity has split in two. There are ordinary people with red blood, and there are those who have evolved to have silver blood. Silvers have abilities ranging from telekinesis to healing.
 

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