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I confess myself enormously disappointed and thoroughly confounded. If there’s a medal for withstanding torture and boredom by reading, nominate me. I feel like citing the first few lines of Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole:

Oh baby don’t you know I suffer
Oh baby can't you hear me moan?
You caught me under false pretenses
How long before you let me go?

Like, seriously, how DUCKING LONG? 6 days. It took me 6 damn days to finally, finally finish this. When I read Glass Sword last year, it reinforced my previously weak notion of continuing this series because I happened to really enjoy it. Hilarious. I sat there for 6 days, forcing myself to read this book, page by page all the while muttering WTF under my breath. Because:
a) There is no plot.
b) It’s about as exciting as watching your nails grow.
c) It is stretched to the point of absolute ridiculousness.
d) The writing is unremarkable, a fact I had previously not paid attention to. Depressing even.
e) You’re just bamboozled by whatever the truck anyone’s trying to say or do. And lastly,
f) ‘Love� for the characters is so strong you want to smash their faces against brick walls.

I believe apart from all this, it also suffers from a major case of incorrect advertising. The tagline should have been somewhere along the lines of:
“Everyone dislikes everyone.�
“We’re all mad here�. Or even,
“He loves me, he loves me not.�
Yet another crime committed against humanity in this book is the forceful reminder that the word “cage� was in the title. I counted 34 times. Annoying as Trump.

Have no fear, children. The spoilers are marked.

Mare Barrow is an insufferable heroine. In fact, every character is; Maven (why people even like him is beyond me), Cal, Farley, Cameron, Evangeline and the rest. She just has the misfortune of being front and center. She is extremely melodramatic, paranoid, thinks too highly of herself and a pain to listen to. She comes off as an ungrateful sentimental lunatic.

I am a huge admirer of the Hunger Games. Obvious reasons aside, the thing that stuck with me the most was how gut-wrenchingly realistic the portrayal of struggle was in those books. Katniss’s ordeal, Snow’s tyranny, oppression leading to aggression, it was all flawless and pulled you in, made you believe. Most books I’ve read since then with a similar premise fail to capture that true sense of a dystopian world. Here, I sometimes had trouble deciding if it was a medieval world or an advanced world. I forgot this was dystopia until cameras or jeeps or jets showed up.

A good chunk of the book sees Mare in Maven’s captivity. Aside from being flummoxed at what the actual deal was with her feelings regarding Maven, I was practically spitting at her overdramatic narration of her imprisonment. When Glass Sword ended, I genuinely believed she would be treated worse beyond my imaginings. Instead, she was given decent quarters to live, dressed in gowns and wasn’t even bodily harmed save for one interrogation. Yes, she wore manacles that suppressed her abilities, yes, she was used for propaganda but that hardly counts as torture, does it? When Snow captured the victors from the arena in Catching Fire he had their minds conditioned through pain to kill the people they loved. They were kept in cells. Even then, they whined less than Mare Barrow.

Now, here’s where I was confused the most. Mare was reeling from betrayal for the entirety of the second book. She pushed Cal away along with everyone else and mourned the loss of the Maven she knew. In this one too, while being in captivity she kept saying the same thing but with no consistency. One minute she’s sad for Maven, the next she hates him. This back and forth irritated me like you wouldn’t believe. This alternating between hating him and pitying him served only to make me detached from the whole thing so much that even when she repeatedly made vows to kill Maven, I couldn’t believe her.

Speaking of Maven, he’s supposed to be a great villain but he isn’t. In fact, if this book is to be believed, he isn’t even one. His personality was destroyed by the evil that was his mother, that part truly saddened me, and whatever he did and became was the result of her manipulations. I understand that, I really do but I just can’t shake the feeling that this particular track of Mare and Maven was the result of people’s unfathomable adoration for him and wasn’t intended. At least that’s the impression I got after finishing the second book. In so many ways King’s Cage had drastic changing of tracks compared with the earlier books like Evangeline’s and Maven’s (view spoiler)[sexualities. Evangeline is a lesbian and Maven is bisexual. (hide spoiler)]

I liked the fact that we got a few chapters from Evangeline’s perspective but Cameron’s chapters were unnecessary. They were supposed to give insight into how other people saw Mare or what was happening with the rebels but anyone else’s point of view would have been welcome compared to Cameron the Spiteful’s. Mare took her irrational and overemotional behavior to the next level at the end of the book. Cal not choosing her or a side always bothered her but he did both eventually. That should have been enough. Of course it wasn’t. (view spoiler)[Cal was offered the kingdom and like the baby that she is she ranted, stomped her foot and demanded that he ‘choose� her instead. She said herself that Cal was a born soldier, he was born for the throne and wanted it but knowing something and accepting it are different things. She didn’t stop to realize what putting a sympathetic Silver on the throne would do for their cause. No, baby Mare had to have her toy. Two words: Unnecessary conflict. (hide spoiler)]

We learn new things about the war as well as the history of the world. Alliances are made, rebellions occur. In hindsight, there were developments in the book but it didn’t feel like it at the time. It’s too lengthy to seem action-packed or fast-paced. One of the things hinted at but not further explored is how the Newbloods/Ardents came to be. I suspect this would be a major plotline in the last book.