One of the benefits of living in a major city is when authors come to town and you have the privilege of being able to exist in their presence for a short time. In February of 2016 I had the utter delight of basking in the literary genius of Pierce Brown, the author of the Red Rising series.

For those of you not familiar with the Red Rising series (you poor, poor souls) the three books in the trilogy, Red Rising, Golden Son and Morning Star, tell the story of Darrow, a lowly Red miner whose heart-wrenching loss leads him into the very midst of the high-society Golds to claim his revenge. What started out as a quest for redemption driven by the words of a young girl soon morphs into the reforging of an entire society, stretching across stars and planets to sweep even the most unwilling…