Red Rising by Pierce Brown

I saw the review for Red Rising in Entertainment Weekly a couple of weeks ago and I figured I'd give it a shot since it said it was pretty much just a mix of Ender's Game and The Hunger Games... and I did enjoy it. The story is about Darrow, a teenager working in a mine on Mars. Of course his people are oppressed by the rulers of Mars and he ends up with a shadowy group that transforms Darrow into one of the elite ruling class "Golds" in order to infiltrate the government and help take them down. But in order to get a good position in society he must first go through a year long competition in which young Golds are put into groups and forced to play a sort of Survivor/Hunger Games thing first in which a whole bunch of them die. While the book isn't a classic like Ender's Game, it is somewhat better than The Hunger Games and is a bit better written. Of course it is only the first book in a trilogy, so the ending leaves you wanting to know what happens next. B+

Also, the book mentions Ulysses, The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, 1984 and The Great Gatsby.