Book Notes: Morning Star

This is the third book in the “Red Rising Saga”, following Golden Son and Red Rising. Similar to the previous two volumes, it is fast-paced, full of action, with compelling characters that are not too flat or predictable.

Book highlights

How many mothers have prayed to see their sons, their daughters return from war only to realize the war has kept them, the world has poisoned them, and they’ll never be the same?

You know a people have given up when they stop teaching their children.

These people are not living. They’re all just trying to postpone the end.

The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads.

I’ve never been a man of joy or a man of war, or an island in a storm. Never an absolute like Lorn. That was what I pretended to be. I am and always have been a man who is made complete by those around him.

And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them.

I told myself I would be better than this. I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility.

It takes more to hope than to remember.

No child in my family watches holos before the age of twelve. We all have nature and nurture to shape us. She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.