A review by ale24
King's Cage by Victoria Aveyard

emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This isn’t a popular opinion, but I actually liked this book more than the previous two books. It might be because it was finally warm enough to go outside to read, so I had a better time reading. However, I also feel like the action scenes in this series weren’t well written and/or just plain boring, and
Mare spent the majority of this book unable to use her special abilities. Which I think did a good job at keeping action scenes to a minimum and grow her character in this particular book. Plus I don’t really love her character so I didn’t mind seeing her go through a tough time (don’t judge me lol)


Maven seems like an interesting character and I was excited to see his character develop,

“Maven Calore is not his own self. He told me as much. He is a construct, a machine, soulless and lost”

but imo the author might have a small issue of telling over showing (I’ll admit that I think Maven and Evangeline are mostly written alright; They just are a little cheesy at times).  

Edit: I wrote the following before I read the next book (which fixed a couple issues and questions I had with King’s Cage), although I don’t feel some of it is true anymore I don’t want to get rid of it since it’s what I felt at the time. Just keep in mind that some of my opinions change in the following book, War Storm.

Credit where credit’s due,
I liked that the author included a male bisexual (or at least a multi sexual person) with a female main love interest and a potential lesbian (her only love interest is a woman so I can’t be sure, the author doesn’t say their sexualities explicitly) since authors usually default to including one gay guy to their books when adding LGBTQ+ characters (in my experience). The only thing is that these characters, as much as I like them, are some of the main antagonists in the book series. This is reminiscent of a pretty negative trope, although I suspect one of them may go through a redemption arc in the next book. While homophobia is not directly referenced, the coded lesbian character is unable to marry her love and has her brother marry her girlfriend instead  so that they can still stay with each other. I’m not sure I like this because the above situation resembles someone living in a homophobic society, meanwhile the text stays somewhat vague about how sexuality is thought of or treated in general. According to her character, her parents treat her surprisingly well despite not allowing her to marry a woman. Even so, when I was reading it I wondered if the reason they had to have heterosexual marriages (it’s unclear if that’s the case for everyone including Reds) was only so they could  produce offspring and not exactly for homophobic reasons. This leaves me conflicted because I can’t point out exactly what I don’t like about the situation, I just wish the book was more explicit in what it was trying to do.


There are many diverse characters, although I get the impression this is set in a color blind setting as there’s no mention or indication of racism. There’s also little mention of sexism or homophobia. Which some people may like or find it unrealistic/not well done (since the princess trials I still don’t know if they live in patriarchy because I guess they could still have a male version of that technically?). 
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