AG's Reviews > Red City

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC and to the wonderful Zana for the buddy read!

🌟🌟🌟/5

When I first heard of Marie Lu's adult debut, I was expecting something similar to Jade City by Fonda Lee (which I didn't manage to finish last year but did really fall in love with, but I digress). Unfortunately, this didn't quite deliver and ended up being painfully mediocre.

The Good:
● ML nailed the urban fantasy vibes. I loved the way she presented both the glamorous and the ugly parts of Angel City. The tension between the rival syndicates was fun to read.
● Between Sam and Ari, Sam's POV was far more compelling. She was fleshed out better (her fraught relationship with her mother added depth to her character). She was also significantly morally grey, which is what I wanted the characters from this book to be. Most of the interesting stuff in this book happened in her POV.
● Sam's mother Connie with only 3 chapters of POV was the best written character, probably because she's inspired by the author's own experiences, as indicated in the author's note. Her experience as an immigrant and her expectations from the country she'd entered were very well written. Hers was the story that tugged at my heartstrings.
● The setup for the romance great: No one being able to look away from Ari and no one ever actually noticing Sam. This could've been excellent, but...it did not.
● The magic system was pretty cool and for the most part, made sense (except for that one mention of plants having keratin, I really hope that's removed from the final copies. A simple Google search will tell you that they do not.) I liked how alchemists have to pay a price for the transformations they perform.


The Bad:
● Although I was invested in Sam's POV, I suffered through Ari's. His entire identity is that everyone's attracted to him, sexually or otherwise. There wasn't any nuance to his story. Even the formulaic male love interests of romantasy have a better personality (THAT'S how bad Ari was).
● This 'romance' is the one of the most unromantic things I've ever read. There was too much telling and no showing. The whole 'star-crossed lovers' thing was based on a bunch of childhood memories that inculded passing notes that, in no way, looked like they were written by seventh graders. There wasn't any room for the development of a romance and that's why the inevitable proclamations-of-undying-love-in-the-face-of-death didn't have the desired effect. For Ari, the sweetness of their teenage memories transformed into lustful thoughts about Sam and that made everything worse. So yeah, 0 stars for the romance.
● Out of all the ways in which this could've been an adult novel, I was disappointed to see Lu take the 'add a whole lot of smut and make it problematic' path. Did both protagonists need to be involved sexually with people who watched them grow up from children to adults?! This aspect of the book overpowered everything else and ultimately ruined the reading experience for me.

'Red City' was one of my most anticipated releases of 2025, but unfortunately, it did not deliver. The final quarter had me hooked to the page, but the story overall was very forgettable. I'm not sure if I'll be reading the sequel, although I do feel like the ending left the protagonists in very interesting positions of power.