They say that trees that grow against cliffsides are tortured, seeds brought there on a wayward breeze and forced to put down roots into stone and salt. They must twist their trunks up at an unnatural angle to accommodate the doomed circumstances they’d been given at birth. Yet they still fight to survive, contort themselves to stretch their branches up to the sun. They grow and grow sideways like this until the day a storm finally tears their bodies apart. And yet, hadn’t they lived wild and free? Weren’t they happy, when they were here? ​
page 418, Red City by Marie Lu
Can’t we be? ​
Are we still two kids who need each other? ​
All I think about is you. ​You are my beginning and end.
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about Red City through a list of anticipated fantasy releases for October 2025 from the booktuber Elliot Brooks back in September 2025. It was the same video where I first heard about Alchemy of Secrets which I read last month. I then heard about it a month later in a video by Tori Morrow who spoke of it quite highly.
Red City is another adult debut by a author making the transition from YA fantasy to adult fantasy so like with Alchemy of Secrets I was also interested in reading such a book and had placed a hold on it at the library. When I heard Tori Morrow compared the book to Jade City in her video my anticipation increased as that was a book I really enjoyed.
My hold for the book arrived shortly after the book’s release. I read the hardcover edition with the dark red/maroon sprayed edges which match the colour scheme of the cover. It seems any big new fiction release these days is getting sprayed edges, as such they have lost any novelty for me. With the exception of the unique sprayed edge design on the Katabasis special edition, solid colour sprayed edges just aren’t doing anything for me anymore.
I have not read any of Marie Lu’s previous books, most of which appear to be YA fantasy. So this is my introduction to the author.
Without further ado, let’s get into the book.
The Book
Red City is a contemporary urban fantasy set mostly in Angel City aka Los Angeles with brief stints to Londinium. Before I even get into the rest, I just find the incongruity between the contemporary urban setting and the names Angel City and Londinium to be a bit…awkward. Why not call them Los Angeles and London? I don’t think the fantasy is enhanced by calling them Angel City and Londinium.
In the world of Red City, the magic system is based on alchemy and access to said alchemy is controlled by crime syndicates who manufacture and market a drug called sand that provides temporary access to a subset of the power of alchemy. I’ll also note here that sand is such a boring name for what the drug presented to be in the story. I think the author could have come up with something a little more exciting than sand.
The Syndicates and the Alchemical Magic System
Alchemy studies is divided into:
- Bioalchemy – the study of transmutation of organic matter
- Philosophy – the study of sand, the philosopher’s stone
- Polemy – the study of alchemical warfare and combat
- Elementalism – the study of elemental alchemy
- Alchiatry – the study of alchemical medicine and healing
Throughout the narrative, we meet characters who perform all of these kinds of alchemy. I think the alchemical magic system in this book is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole fantasy at play. I really want to see how it is used in later books in the series.
The most powerful syndicates in the world are:
- Grand Central
- Belle Epoque
- Lumines
- Neuewelt
- Pirenne
- Hong Meng
- Viongozi
- Babylonia
In this first book, most of the story revolves around characters in the Grand Central and Lumines syndicates. We get brief appearances of characters from the Belle Epoque syndicate but other than that the other syndicates don’t get mentioned in any significant way in this book.
I am fascinated by the various syndicates and their histories, for example, we get a brief mention of Babylonia which was founded in Babylon at the height of its power. I really want to know what their syndicate is like and what kind of alchemic/magical rituals they are involved in.
Characters
Most of Red City‘s story is told from the perspective of our two main characters – Sam aka Samantha Lang and Ari. The first 25% of the book is focused on character development for both of these characters, starting from their childhood and early school ears to their joining of the crime syndicates – Sam into Grand Central, Ari into Lumines.
There is a certain degree of tension in the first 25% as the two characters start developing feelings for each other but are also at the same time both are recruited into crime syndicates that oppose each other. The way Sam and Ari interact in these early chapters is heartbreaking and I’ll leave it that to avoid spoilers.
I liked these characters well enough but I never quite fell in love with them. This book is definitely where I found that the plot is what keeps me interested in the characters and not the other way around. The factional conflict mixed in with the romance between Sam and Ari creates a vibe I can only really describe as very Romeo and Juliet. Instead of warring families, it is warring crime syndicates and Sam and Ari are star crossed lovers caught in the middle of all this, making the impossible choice between loyalty to their syndicates and their love for each other.
Of the two main characters, I did find Ari to be far less interesting of a character than Sam. I think his character wasn’t quite developed properly and he felt more like a plot vehicle than a character in places. The book seems to boil Ari down to two things – his charisma and his love for Sam with little bits of other things thrown in for flavour.
As far as side characters go, with the exception of Sebastian Van Den Berg aka Hades, I didn’t find any of them particularly compelling. Hades is a serial killer working for Grand Central and as I mentioned in my review of The God of the Woods I don’t usually like the serial killer archetype but in this book, he is by far the most interesting of the side characters in this book and as a bonus he is a fun villain.
Themes
That brings me to the themes present in the book, one of which is loyalty. The narrative continuously tugs at the inner conflict that Sam and Ari are going through about their respective loyalties. The syndicates in turn test their loyalties in ways that they are not comfortable with. I think this thematic exploration is reasonably well done.
Sam’s backstory also involves the story of her single immigrant mother Connie and her struggles growing up poor. Sam’s initial primary motivation for joining Grand Central was so that she could get money to support her mom. There are distinct mentions of the complex and often fraught relationships the children of immigrants have with their parents. Coming hot off the heels of The Emperor of Gladness however I found the exploration here to be a little simplistic and heavy handed. It wasn’t bad, just weaker in comparison to the book I read the previous week.
As I alluded to earlier, romance is one of the themes present throughout the book. I thought this book did a good job of really creating a sense of tension and yearning within the romance and that is one of the aspects of the ending that left me wanting to read the next book in the series so I can see what happens in Sam and Ari’s relationship. There are a couple spicy scenes and as usual I found myself skimming through them as I don’t like reading such scenes. They weren’t particularly bad or anything, just not my cup of tea.
Conclusions
I generally enjoyed my time reading Red City. The combination of the interesting alchemical magic system with the factional conflict of crime syndicates is a very potent one. The book had a bit of a slow start but it was very much necessary to flesh out our main characters and set up the various elements of the fantasy world.
I am looking forward to reading the sequel to this book and I hope the book dives into the other syndicates mentioned in this first book and I would love to see characters from those syndicates be a part of the narrative as well. As far as the urban fantasy aspect goes, I think it would also be cool of future books to make the cities more of a character by themselves rather than just the setting.
That’s all from me, see y’all next time.
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