This book is one of the most well-written/edited books I’ve read. Full stop.
It manages to maintain excellent pacing throughout the entire work while still building incredible world/magic systems, but also leading readers through robust character development.
Red City is a violent story of rival criminal syndicates based in L.A. that centers around the practice of alchemy and a drug called Sand. We follow two best friends who find themselves on opposite sides without realizing until it’s too late.
There are horror elements in this urban fantasy, including a serial-killer coworker and body horror tied to alchemical transformations. It gets gritty to say the least.
Please check trigger warnings. I’m really disappointed that one specific content warning was not on the author’s website. This should be standard for any authors/books that contain triggering content, such as (see below). I didn’t see it on Goodreads either. The only warnings I found were on StoryGraph, but since the tags are community-added, it’s hard to know the content level accurately.
While objectively this book is a finely crafted creation, can I say I enjoyed it? Did I enjoy watching two innocent, beautiful souls enter a world of destruction, survival, coercion, retaliation, drugs, crime, violence, etc.? No. But hope always holds out longest, and I devoured this book for glimpses of it.
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Trigger warnings detail: SPOILER ALERT!
Click to reveal spoiler
Specific content warnings: There is a side character (Sam’s mother) who’s boss rapes her. It’s off-screen, but what’s on-page is the scene leading up to it, so please bear this in mind. It’s incredibly triggering. She also has flashbacks later on, and the perpetrator shows up in other scenes of the book, so it’s not something that only appears once, but the event and theme pop up again a few times. Additionally, there are scenes with explicit sexual content that I skipped over (because, trauma), but from catching a few words of Sam and Will’s pages, it didn’t sound good. It sounded rough. And I would offer another caution for this as well, for those who may not want their trauma to be triggered. Again, I wish the author had provided content warnings somewhere obvious, like her website or Goodreads.Of course, there are far more content warnings regarding violence, body horror, and drug use.
About the Author
Marie Lu was born in China but currently lives in L.A. Find more information on the author’s website linked here.
