Red Queen: Some Random Thoughts

My favorite book of all time is Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. (Although The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen and The Keeper of the Lost Cities series by Shannon Messenger are close contenders.) If you haven’t read it (or them) you should.

This post does include some mild spoilers. You have been warned. (But if you haven’t read the book, I doubt it’ll make much sense.)

I am currently reading Red Queen for the fourth time.

But my rererereading it brings up some points that I always have had questions about.

It explicitly states that there aren’t any physical differences between a Red and Silver, other than the fact the Silvers are generally paler and blush weird.

That implies that if one were to place a Silver and a rather pale Red next to each other, one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them (unless the Silver started blowing stuff up or something).

And now my question: The inside of a person’s mouth is pinkish due to their red blood. So if a person had silver blood, wouldn’t the inside of their mouth be gray or something? The corner of a person’s eye is also pinkish due to their red blood. Wouldn’t that be silver for a Silver?

So if the inside of a Silver’s mouth was gray and the inside of a Red’s mouth was pink, then wouldn’t the High Houses know that Mare was only posing as a Silver as soon as she opened her mouth to say something?

Spinette has made an interesting theory on this point, which will follow the colon: What if Silvers have a strange affinity for cherry Kool-Aid or something else with intense red dye?

And now my second question: I have some problems with Mare’s cover story. It said that Mareena Titanos was a Silver who was raised by Reds and she didn’t know that she was a Silver until she was seventeen.

That implies that she didn’t know the color of her own blood, which means that for as long as she could remember, Mareena hadn’t bled at all. Doesn’t this mean that Mareena never injured herself? She never even got a paper cut?

And if Mareena truly was a Silver raised by Reds who believed that she had red blood, it means that she never looked in a mirror to see that her mouth was not pink, but instead gray.

Either way, I am willing to overlook these minor technicalities and just love the book. (But I would love it if someone would explain to me how these things could be. I’m talking to you, Victoria Aveyard.)