Glass Sword

Victoria Aveyard was born in 1990 in East Longmeadow, a small town in Western Massachusetts. Growing up, she was an avid reader. She especially enjoyed fantasy novels, including Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. When she was 18, Aveyard moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California. There, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in screenwriting. One year after she graduated university, Aveyard wrote her first fantasy novel, Red Queen. The novel was a success, and Aveyard continued the Red Queen series with three sequels, two prequel novellas, and a short story collection. Since then, Aveyard has published a second book series, Realm Breaker, which has become a #1 New York Times bestseller.

In Glass Sword, the central characters’ fight against oppression and social injustices echoes real-life struggles for justice, equality, and liberation. In an American context, the subjugation of “Red slaves” by “Silver kings” in Glass Sword is reminiscent of the long history of the oppression of Black people and other minority groups in the United States, which persists through institutionalized racism and white supremacist ideology. The fictional divide between Reds and Silvers in Aveyard’s writing isn’t exactly equivalent to real issues of race and racism, but it does reflect how human differences have been used insidiously throughout history to justify the creation of harmful divisions and hierarchies among people. Additionally, while Aveyard was writing Glass Sword, American society was facing a rise in white supremacy and hate crimes leading up to the 2016 presidential election. At the same time, many social movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, were actively pushing back against different forms of inequality and discrimination. These developments form the backdrop against which Aveyard published her novel, which portrays the importance of opposing prejudice, inequality, and oppression.

While writing Glass Sword, the second book in the Red Queen series, Aveyard was influenced by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, which was highly popular throughout the 2010s. As young adult fantasy novels, The Hunger Games and Glass Sword share similar themes. In both stories, the teenaged female protagonist becomes the face of a rebellion against an oppressive government in an unjust society, as she simultaneously struggles with her own trauma, identity, and relationships. Aveyard was also inspired by X-Men, a story about heroes with superpowers, to write about characters with superhuman abilities in Glass Sword. Other similar works to Glass Sword include Aveyard’s own series Realm Breaker, which also follows unlikely heroes through tense action, twists, and betrayals as they strive to save their world. Additionally, Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me series is another young adult dystopian romance that features a 17-year-old female protagonist with a dangerous power, who joins a rebellion against an oppressive government.