Iron Gold – Slightly Rusted

Happy New Year! 2025 is here, there are new books coming out, and everyone is looking outwards to where fantasy and science fiction will go this year. Now is the perfect time to review the fourth book in a beloved and established series that people already have their minds made up about. Over the winter break, I had the interesting experience of reading Iron Gold, the fourth book in the Red Rising saga by Pierce Brown and the first book in the second trilogy of his era-spanning space opera. Way back at the start of this site (10 years ago), we reviewed the first trilogy very favorably, even making the second book (Golden Son) our top book of the year when it was published. As I finally made my way back to the Red Rising universe, I was curious what my time away did to my perspective and I wondered if I would enjoy this next chapter as much as the first. I found that the results were…mixed.

Without giving too many spoilers, Iron Gold takes place many years after the end of book three. In the first series, Darrow leads a solar system-wide rebellion of the oppressed masses to overthrow their Gold overlords. Now, we see Darrow as an older individual trying to help rule the new people’s democracy he helped put in place. The issue is that his enemies still live, bunkered down on Venus and the Outer Rim. While Darrow pushes for just one more campaign to bring the enemies of the Republic down, the internal management of the growing empire is not going well. People starve, corruption is rampant, and living conditions are not great. The endless war has given an entire generation of citizens rampant PTSD, and despite dethroning the awful Golds who controlled the system before, things aren’t getting better. How can Darrow hold together his young Republic and keep it safe?

An issue I experienced right off the bat is that Iron Gold treats you as if you have just finished reading Morningstar and have all the intricate political factions fresh in your mind. I had a hard time keeping them straight when I was in the thick of it a decade ago, but the huge gap absolutely did not help. In the meantime, the book is populated by a plethora of fabulous characters with some interesting picks for our window into the story. Our view into this barely functioning new system consists of POVs from Darrow, Lyria (a young Red girl who shows us how the people are getting on), Ephraim (an ex-legionnaire turned thief), and Lysander (a gold on scout missions out on the Outer Rim). To say they are unbalanced is an understatement. Lysander is the worst by a long shot, seeming to exist solely to set up conflict and plot for the later books in the series. The entirety of his plotline feels irrelevant, hard to follow, and has absolutely no bearing on what happens in Iron Gold. Lysander also just categorically sucks as a character, which feels intentional, but he did not endear his POV to me, and I audibly groaned every time I hit one of his chapters.

Lyria is interesting in that she starts out pretty rough, but I grew to like her a lot over the course of the story. From sentence one, she is very clearly designed to be the “sad” perspective and shows how bad the poor have it under the new Republic. Ephraim, on the other hand, is the G.O.A.T. at all times. He’s a fascinating and deep character, his plotlines are absolutely kick-ass, and his story feels like a real evolution of the narrative from the first three books. I have no notes for Ephraim, and he constantly reminded me what I loved about Brown’s writing a decade ago. His story has great characterization, dynamic dialogue, huge, flashy set pieces, and a deep well of drama that never runs dry.

And then we have Darrow. Darrow is a very interesting character because he is very clearly the villain of Iron Gold, but I never got the sense that Brown understood that Darrow is the villain. Darrow’s perspective could have been very interesting, but it was plagued by the constant issue that I don’t think Brown and I agreed on what his role was in the story. I saw Darrow as a psychotic despot whose constant exposure to war has stripped his ability to think rationally, and his increasingly bad choices have started to lead him down a path without possible redemption as he becomes one of the monsters he devoted his life to tear down. But I get the sense that Brown sees Darrow as a case study of how violence, no matter how horrifying, is super cool as long as you look like a badass as you do it.

I am fully willing to be wrong about this take, but over and over, I read chapters where Darrow made bad choices that didn’t feel vilified by the narrative. This really came to a head when I watched the murder of innocent peacekeepers who were trying to detain him (as a last resort), and there were about two sentences devoted to Darrow thinking about how fucked up this was and about 30 pages devoted to how cool Darrow looked while doing the murders. All of this is not helped by the fact that Iron Gold does not stand well as an independent book. The three major plotlines feel like they have little to no overlap, though I can tell that Brown clearly is planning to bring them together later on.

All of this left me feeling a bit disenchanted with the whole story. Brown is still a master of prose. His writing is as gripping as ever, and he lives and breathes drama like a soap opera master. Yet, when I read the first trilogy and the narrative was so wildly over the top, I was able to enjoy it for what it was and not think too deeply if there were moral quandaries around the actions of the characters. With Iron Gold, I found that wall a lot thinner, and it was much harder to keep the critical questions from creeping in–even with all the cool stunts and action.

My summary experience coming out of Iron Gold is that I still had a lot of fun, but I have some serious concerns about the thematic end goals of the narrative. Brown still has an incredible talent for dynamic prose, but the plotlines should have been able to better stand on their own in book four, and I wish Lysander had been cut completely. I am unsure if I will continue the series and I would love to hear from any of you who has chosen to do so about what your final thoughts were.

Rating: Iron Gold – 7.0/10
-Andrew