ARC Review: Red Tigress

Ana’s brother is dead. With her aunt Morganya taking the throne and beginning her reign in a shower of blood, Ana finds herself in need of help to stop her. But how to defeat someone who seems to hold all the power, especially when there’s whispers of a powerful weapon that she’s searching for? Ana has to partner with the dashing Ramson once again and travel to the kingdom of Bregon, in the hopes of securing an alliance that will save her and her people’s lives.

I received an advanced reading copy of Red Tigress in exchange for an honest review.

Red Tigress is a young adult fantasy novel by Amélie Wen Zhao, and it also happens to be the sequel to Blood Heir, which I reviewed some time ago. It’s the second book of the Blood Heir trilogy, and it certainly has quite its share of excitement!

If there was ever a novel that was plot-led, I’d say this one was it. From the very beginning, we find ourselves still reeling a bit from the aftermath of what happened at the end of the last book. And here is where I admit that I didn’t quite remember what had happened at the end of the last book. I had a vague idea, but I did have to find my copy of it and re-read the last few chapters to figure out exactly what I was diving into in these. I remembered some specific moments, but definitely not enough, and the while there’s only really one major event from the last book that matters in this one, it’s a pretty important one! I’m honestly surprised I didn’t actually remember it.

Anyway, back to the book. Well, this book sets a pretty relentless pace for all our POV characters. It was so relentless, in fact, that I found it a bit hard to keep up. Do you guys ever read books where just so much is happening on the page that it’s hard to connect to the characters? I had that feeling. I thought the book could have used a few more quiet moments, just to let us get to know the characters and their relationships, and while there is a short sequence where all the characters are just mostly hanging out while planning what they’re going to do next, it wasn’t enough to sustain me for the entire book.

There’s one character in particular that I would have loved to know more about, and that is Sorsha. I thought Sorsha could have really been such a fascinating character, very much like Azula from Avatar: the Last Airbender, but instead, she felt sort of flat. She had one dimension and nothing else, and I thought spending a bit more time with her, or even having some specific characters remembering more about her would have helped immensely in making her much scarier, and a much more interesting character overall. I don’t know what it is about characters like this that draw me to them, but I think she could have been so much more.

We do meet some other fun characters who I really want to discuss but I also know that would spoil some big moments for you guys. In fact, I could have already spoiled something telling you about Sorsha, but I don’t think so, since you guys still don’t know who she is, and she is exactly as I described from the very first second she shows up on the page.

The book was exciting, though! With all the action, there were lots of surprises in store for all the characters, and the stakes were both impressive and enormous. This is definitely the kind of book for someone who just wants to see lots of things happening, one after the other, and definitely lots of blood. (Well, the series is called the Blood Heir trilogy, right?)

Also, this book doesn’t really suffer from the second-book syndrome, where a middle book in a trilogy only serves as a connection between books one and three. There’s definitely a self-contained plot here, although it doesn’t get revealed until later, and that sort of ties it all up quite nicely, while still leaving much open for book three.

Overall, I thought the book was good, but it didn’t excite me as much as the first one did. I think part of it was that I struggled to connect to the characters here, but that was my problem specifically. There’s lots of other people who are in it for the action, for the blood, and for the magic. And there’s a lot of really cool magic stuff that happens in here! There’s enough of it, in fact, that I definitely am going to read the final book in the trilogy!

Red Tigress will be released on March 2. You can pre-order your copy from Delacorte Press here.

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