Red City Review: Behold Marie Lu's Violent, Emotional Adult Debut

Marie Lu Confidently Steps Out of the YA World with Harrowing, Emotionally Complex Fantasy Red City

Author Marie Lu is a heavy hitter in the world of young adult fiction. Her YA books have run the gamut from sweeping fantasy (The Young Elites) to high-tech dystopian thrillers (Warcross), but what they all have in common is her ability to tell a cracking, propulsive story with compelling characters at their centers. Red City is her official adult debut, but the book — the first in a new series — takes many of the traits that made her YA work so popular and cranks them up to eleven, just with a hefty dash of brutal violence and spice on top.

Mixing familiar tropes from crime fiction, magical boarding school-set fantasy, Lu’s first adult novel is a dual chosen one narrative full of seemingly impossible choices, morally gray characters, and uncomfortably real consequences that never privilege either of its leads over the other. It will leave readers genuinely divided about where the loyalties lie in the world of the story, who they’re meant to be rooting for, and how they’re meant to feel. Its compulsive pacing, copious action, and many twists keep the pages flying, and no one should be surprised if they tear through this story in the space of mere days (I did.)

Set in a world where alchemy is real but the majority of humanity remains largely unaware of its existence, Red City follows the story of two outsiders whose youthful friendship becomes more complicated when they both grow up to join what are essentially rival magical gangs. Samantha Lang is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant mother who works around the clock in an attempt to give her daughter the opportunity of a better life than the one that led them to flee their homeland. Sam is a generally quiet kid, so unobtrusive that many around her never even seem to see her. Or, at least, that’s true for everyone except Ari, a classmate from the slums of Gujarat, India, who has been brought to Angel City to study at a secret school of alchemy The pair strike up an instant and surprisingly deep friendship, passing notes, sharing feelings, and bonding emotionally about their unique experiences, even as they keep the specifics of their lives (and extracurricular activities) under wraps.

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But when Sam’s mother loses her job, she turns to a local wealthy celebrity named Diamond Taylor for help, and she’s unexpectedly drawn into the mysterious underground world of alchemy, which involves everything from rival guilds of practitioners to the production of a mysterious substance known as sand. Essentially, the drug of choice among both alchemists and normal people, sand is a performance-enchancing drug that essentially makes those who consume it into the best versions of themselves — more intelligent, charismatic, or capable in some way or other. Diamond recruits Sam into the Grand Central syndicate in exchange for financial assistance for her family, a choice that immediately puts her on a collision course with Ari, who, unbeknownst to her, has grown into a powerful member of the rival Lumines group.

As the years pass and both rise in the ranks of their respective organizations, the violence between their groups grows increasingly deadly. It’s pretty much inevitable that the former best friends (and maybe something more) would one day have to face off against each other. But nothing about how that very obvious plot twist unfolds is what readers will likely expect, and Lu does an excellent job of muddying up both characters in terms of their motivations and actions. There are certainly no heroes here, though it’s incredibly easy to sympathize with and even root for almost all the parties involved.

Red City’s take on alchemy is both thematically rich and refreshingly straightforward. For example, a person can fight by essentially conjuring a weapon out of another nearby item (a table, a wall, the floor) and can hurt their enemies by transforming the water in their veins to ice. But the cost of such actions is not zero—each transmutation, for even the smallest of shifts, costs the alchemist doing the changing a literal piece of their soul. How much of themselves are Sam, Ari, and all the other alchemists around them willing to trade away to get what they want? What does it ultimately cost someone who must constantly harm themselves in this way? In the world of this story, magic is also violence, and there’s something deeply unsettling about the ways that those who practice it must literally numb themselves to all sorts of pain.

The story deftly uses both Sam and Ari’s positions as outsiders in a world of wealth, privilege, and power to explore the ways their identities are weaponized against them—and ultimately the ways they are both weaponized against one another. Both are nearly generational powers in the worlds of their respective guilds, yet neither feels as though they truly belong, and each spends much of the book chasing the validation that comes from the approval of those around them. The star-crossed aspect of their relationship has distinct Romeo & Juliet vibes, and though both have relationships with others over the course of the book, their memories of one another are still tinged with a bittersweet edge that stems from the fact that they’ve never really had a proper chance to be together.

Red City isn’t a world where happy endings are even truly possible, let alone guaranteed, and Lu also doesn’t pull any punches about the fact that there’s some aspect of both Sam and Ari that thrills at the power they wield in their respective underground communities, and each longs for the approval of various mentors and compatriots within their respective gangs. As they are each forced to make increasingly difficult choices, both become complicit in violence and darkness in a way neither could have ever expected. The book’s explosive ending — both literally and figuratively speaking — offers both a temporary catharsis (of sorts) and sets up even bigger stakes for the series’ second installment. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take too long to arrive.

Red City is available now wherever books are sold.

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

Marie Lu Confidently Steps Out of the YA World with Harrowing, Emotionally Complex Fantasy Red City