Victoria Aveyard: King's Cage (Red Queen #3)
In this breathless third installment to Victoria Aveyard’s bestselling Red Queen series, allegiances are tested on every side. And when the Lightning Girl's spark is gone, who will light the way for the rebellion?
Mare Barrow is a prisoner, powerless without her lightning, tormented by her lethal mistakes. She lives at the mercy of a boy she once loved, a boy made of lies and betrayal. Now a king, Maven Calore continues weaving his dead mother's web in an attempt to maintain control over his country—and his prisoner.
As Mare bears the weight of Silent Stone in the palace, her once-ragtag band of newbloods and Reds continue organizing, training, and expanding. They prepare for war, no longer able to linger in the shadows. And Cal, the exiled prince with his own claim on Mare's heart, will stop at nothing to bring her back.
When blood turns on blood, and ability on ability, there may be no one left to put out the fire—leaving Norta as Mare knows it to burn all the way down.
“As you enter, you pray to leave. As you leave, you pray to never return.”
Alright I don't know why am I doing this to myself. Every time I start some book series and don't like them I force myself trough it. I simply do not understand why, but I kept reading even though King's Cage was 500 pages of death.
I must say I liked it better than Glass Sword, but still didn't live up to the hype it gets. Good thing about Glass Sword being horrible was that I lowered my expectations, so, even though it was boring and disappointing, I could enjoy reading it in some way.
Book was, again, boring and non dynamic. Plot was super dull, with two twists and both were pretty predictable battles. The first half of the book was all about Mare's captivity and I die every time I have to read her narrative. After battle in Archeon, things got better, but still, I don't understand how can someone write book this long with so few happenings.
I have a big dilemma about how I feel about all political and military elements of the plot. From one side, it is interesting to read about all those tactics and political solutions. I get the picture author is trying to represent with equality, but from the other side those parts are written so terribly. Even though I wanted to read and understand about certain aspects of attacks, political affairs or schemes I just couldn't because it was so boring.
I liked that new perspectives were introduced, such as Evangeline's and Cameron's. They are two characters I originally liked and reading from their perspective made me like them more, even though they lack some development. In the end it all ends up with Mare...
I think I stated my opinion on Mare well enough in my review of Glass Sword, but she just keeps annoying me. Her monologues are always the same, every time she thinks about Maven or Cal there are two thoughts which are repeated on and on. Her 'grey personality' is based on constant thoughts and endless paragraphs of 'I am monster' and 'should I go to war or should I stay home with my family'. It feels like author doesn't know what to do with her character anymore. She was supposed to be traumatised from six months of imprisonment, but all her reactions just feel forced.
About the love interest... I don't know anymore. Cal was annoying from the beginning for his inability to choose side and weakness. He is spineless and I never wanted him to be endgame. Spoiler:
My baby Maven finally got some place in this story. I wanted to read from his perspective, but never mind I am happy to get at least some scrapes of his personality and development. He is one of my favourite characters and he is one of the reasons I keep reading these books.
Anyway I hope War Storm is more interesting and intense. There should be some revelation about Reds and newbloods and how they were created. I just need it to be dynamic, because I cannot endure 600 pages of this torture...
Lina｜★★★☆☆
I can’t believe I’m actually saying this—but this was not that bad.Most likely, it’s because my expectations were so lowered after Glass Sword that I basically didn’t expect anything apart from 500 more pages of boring, torturous monologue with no action whatsoever. Whatever the case, this book managed to interest me enough that I didn’t have to force myself to finish it, as was the case with Glass Sword.
The first (more than) half of the book focuses on Mare’s imprisonment. At first I thought this was going to be a Red Queen spin-off mixed with Glass Sword, which kind of was the case, at least from my perspective, but I don’t really care for that so I didn’t mind. What I’m really glad for is that two new point of views were introduced in this book, Evangeline’s and Cameron’s. Both of them I liked in previous books so it was nice and refreshing to read from their perspectives, especially Evangeline’s since we got to see the other side of the story.
Still, most of the story was narrated by Mare which... I don’t know... I can’t say I hated it as much I did in Glass Sword, but most of the time I didn’t really enjoy it either. Dialogues and scenes where something is happening are fine, but all of her inner monologues started sounding the same. While she is decidedly less annoying in this book, it seems (as a friend of mine mentioned in her review) that Victoria Aveyard simply ran out of ideas what to do with her after a while. Another thing that bothered me was how, after everything she has been through, she all of the sudden starts acting like a crybaby almost in the middle of the action. Consistency who?
However, the thing that actually annoyed me the most about Mare was her relationship with Cal. I get where that comes from, I really do. I even get people who ship them. But I just couldn’t. The thing is, no matter how much, in lack of a better word, “nice” Cal can act, I didn’t really like him. Pretty much these quotes sum it all:
“Cal follows orders but he can’t make choices.”
“The prince is as he has always been. A good person at his core, but unwilling to act. Unwilling to truly change himself.”
The plot itself was... well, to be honest it was pretty predictable how both action scenes were going to turn out, although there were a few some small surprises along the way. If you are looking for something with unexpected twists and mind-blowing reveals, you won’t find it here. But some things are still happening and (hopefully) plots for the next book seem to have been set into motion. Altogether, I guess everything would have worked much better if it was a 300something, or even a 400 page book.
But as I said, this book was not all that bad and there were some things that I did like. First of them being, of course, Maven. It was really interesting finding out more about him, his motives and upbringing, and although we didn’t get his perspective (fingers crossed for War Storm), I’m glad we got to see more of him in this book. He was literally one of my favourite and also most intriguing characters in this series and I can’t wait to see what will happen to him at the end of this series.
Apart from Maven, some other characters I liked/whose fates I cared about were Farley, Cameron, Evangeline and Kilorn. Also, am I the only one who just wants Julian and Sara to have a nice little happy ending?
Another thing I liked was also the thing that kept me from dying of boredom while reading the first half of the book- the court intrigues. Although not much was happening, all the manipulations and small deceits somehow kept me interested enough to keep reading.
As you could see, I have pretty mixed opinions about this book and therefore I had a hard time deciding on the rating. At the end I decided on giving it three stars, although my actual rating would be somewhere a little bit lower on the scale, since I’m trying to give as little half-star raings as possible, and this book was sill decidedly better than Glass Sword.
Would I recommend this book? Probably not, especially since that would mean you have to read Glass Sword first. But if you have set your mind on finishing this series as I did, than I can promise you it is better than it’s predecessor
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