King's Cage by Victoria Aveyard
King's Cage is the this book in the Red Queen series and starts almost right where Glass Sword left off. With the way that Glass Sword ended, I was highly anticipating reading King's Cage. While the book was fantastic for the last quarter, the first 75% did not impress me very much.
The first half of this book was almost solely Mare being Maven's prisoner and just seemed to drag on forever. The most exciting part was when someone attacked Maven and tried to kill him. The scene where Mare floods her bathroom and drops a chandelier to electrocute her guards was fantastic and totally bad ass. The bits that included the Scarlet guard were okay but, they also seemed tedious. I was not a fan of reading Camren's viewpoint. It was just very bland. I got pretty excited when Nanny showed up and thought that FINALLY they were going to rescue Mare but, then that completely fell apart in the most horrible way. It isn't that I don't think Victoria Aveyard should have shown Mare's time in captivity. I just feel like this whole section could have been sped up a bit.
Another thing that really got to me was how Mare seemed so indecisive about how she felt about Maven. He's a psychotic, manipulative, evil bastard and has been this whole series. I thought we had moved on from these feelings in the previous book and having them in this book as much as they were just made it seem repetitive. Although, I did love that it was actually Evangeline that helped Mare escape and made the whole rescue successful.
When Mare finally is rescued, things started getting better very slowly. I was happy and relieved to see that everyone left in the Barrow family was still alive and well. It made me so happy to see that Gisa's hand was healed and that healers had regrow Mare's dad's missing leg. It was also very bittersweet that Farley had Shade's baby, and I totally predicted that she was pregnant in the last book. I wonder if the baby will have powers like Shade did.
Like I said before, I didn't like that Mare still had conflicting feelings about Maven. However, I do think that it would have been totally normal for her mind to connect similarities between Maven and Cal, and thought that this aspect was done really well. I thought the developing romance between Mare and Cal was done well also and they were pretty cute together. I didn't like that Kilorn was super down played in this book and was hoping we'd see a little more between him and Mare, even if it wasn't romantic, he is still her best friend and she barley reacted when they were reunited. Hopefully in the next book we'll get a little more of them.
I absolutely loved that there were other Newbloods with lightning powers. It was really cool that there were others with lightning powers but, the fact that they had different kinds of lightning powers was amazing. As if Mare's powers weren't already great, if she learns how to master the other types she'll be unstoppable.
I saw the end of this book coming from a mile away. Of course something was going to go wrong. Not that I thought it was bad, just a bit predictable. The fact that Cal was so quick to bend to the will of the others was more shocking than the fact that he did concede to them. It would have been more in character of him to try to find a way out of the situation or to argue against it.
For once, I actually felt bad for Evangeline as she is just getting bounced back and forth between the Calore brothers. It makes it seem like she is just a possession that can be used to benefit everyone but herself. She could totally kick everyones' asses if she wanted to and I feel like in the next book we may see her switch completely to side good guy (hopefully not via a Severus Snape like method) and I think it would be great to see how that character development could go.
While King's Cage may not have been as good as I was expecting it to be, I'm not giving up on this series. Many series go through slumps or sections that aren't that great, and then continue on to be fantastic. I think that the next book in the series will be really good and I'm definitely looking forward to it. I just hope that it's better than King's Cage and doesn't drag on as that did. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this series gets wrapped up and what may be in store next for the characters. I really just hope everyone, except Maven and the Samos (minus Evangeline), makes it out alive and get their own chances at a happy ending.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
