SECTION 1: URBAN FANTASY BOOKS SIMILAR TO WRITTEN IN RED
I love how Bishop shows the historical elements with a reverse-colonialism perspective for how humans tried to take over and failed. It demonstrates the power of magic, and it also sets up the tension that continues throughout the series between humans, Others, and those caught in between. Andrews doesn’t go as deep in the first book in their series, but they still manage to set up a world where magic and regular folk coexist in a shifting paradigm of reality, creating a similar level of tension.
SECTION 2: MOST POWERFUL THEMES IN WRITTEN IN RED
Loads of tension!
Meg, the main character of the story, is a human, technically, but she’s also a type of psychic known as a Cassandra Sanguine; a blood prophet. Whenever her skin is cut, she can see visions of the future usually focused around those closest to her, such as the person who gave her the cut.
As the outlier and a person who could fit in either world, either human or Other, Meg forces these communities to re-examine their positioning. While she is human, she was kept as a prisoner and used for her abilities by humans in a situation akin to a sex trafficking ring. With the Others, they still see her as human, but her abilities and situation of being a human on the run for being different changes the situation.
By having a person who exists within both yet neither community, Bishop forces the questions of what it means for communities to coexist and how do we define the groups in which we identify with and relate. She also highlights that communities are more like living things that must evolve and change or risk stagnation and death.
SECTION 3: WHAT I DID NOT LIKE ABOUT WRITTEN IN RED
Granted, she wrote this book knowing she was going to write a full series that would have critical reveal moments about different characters throughout all of her interweaving storylines. For that reason, I can understand why she doesn’t fully explain what some of the more nontraditional supernatural beings can do. Nevertheless, at times, it felt like there was a secret everyone else knew and I was left out in the cold.