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Me reading this book:




After one semi-intelligible novel in Red Queen and one genuine flop in Glass Sword, King’s Cage was going to be 26-year-old Victoria Aveyard’s Hail Mary on the series that was supposed to be the “next big YA thing�� but has been a painful lesson in hype versus realistic expectation. Does it succeed in doing so: I so badly wanted to say she turned things around but she didn’t �� and that’s putting it nicely.

Here’s the thing that I’m still wondering about with Victoria Aveyard �� how did things go so wrong for her? I mean, she had it all: HarperTeen and Epic Reads carefully controlled the reviews of the book by pre-leasing copies to targeted BookTubers whose opinion they could count on to be positive; the marketing campaign, if anything, was maybe too aggressive, with people hyping up Red Queen all over the place �� on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram �� and calling it the next Hunger Games, Divergent, Selection, and that everyone should buy it.

And we were like �� Sure Thing Entitled White People! We Believe You!




I can’t remember a release as advertising-intense as this since Divergent was out and it worked that time round so then how, exactly, did it all torpedo in Aveyard’s face and not turn her into the Suzanne Collins success she was constructed to be by her publisher? The odds were in her favour. She had plenty of high-powered connections; she breezed casually straight to a publishing and movie deal with barely any effort at all; she had it all. BookTuber reviews are pretty good at swaying public opinion and masking any problems of a book by pillowing the internet with praise, so I never expected to see 1 star and 2 star reviews piling up on the main comments page.

So�� what the hell happened?

I can chalk up to only a few things. The first, Veronica Roth entered the scene with the very first Hunger Games-inspired book and by the time Victoria Aveyard published that door had clearly and loudly shut. The second, Aveyard accidentally compared her work to be on par with Game of Thrones, an act in itself which is just setting yourself up for failure because then people are automatically disappointed when it’s nowhere even close. Beyond that, I think people are just tired of reading Game of Thrones and Hunger Games knock-offs no matter how good the publicity departments claim they are. I think YA publishing is finally starting to come out of its coma and realise that they have GOT TO STOP pushing the same derivative plot before we all tear our eyes out.

And finally, Victoria is kind of�� elitist�� There’s a line between being proud and being stuck-up and I think Aveyard crossed that line without meaning to. And in a world that is becoming incredibly impossible to separate the artist from the art, Aveyard tends to come across as elitist. Next to the release of Red Queen Aveyard released an article on her blog () that didn’t really help that image.




But her personality really became even more apparent when she started lashing out to critics on ŷ������ and caused probably the biggest awkward silence in book reviewer history.




To be honest, I gave her a pass on that one because she was new and I can understand people lashing out on what people say on goodreads. But she has to understand that criticism is a part of being in the entertainment industry and I can tell you for a fact that most of the reviews on goodreads are tame in comparison to what’s out there.

If you can’t handle what people say on goodreads and you’re a writer then man you’re in the wrong industry because there are going to be people that say things much worse in the future. You shouldn’t be lashing out at these people. You should be using goodreads as a practice ground. Plus a lot of criticisms from people �� who weren’t paid by HarperTeen to give it five or four stars �� are pretty valid, and if Aveyard had listen to one or two of their comments I feel this series really could have been pulled up from its death-spiral. In response to a lot of fair criticism, Aveyard just doubled-down and placed the blame on piracy, ARCS, and 1 star rogue reviewers which is insane because on average five star reviews outnumber 1 star reviews about 60, 000 to one.






Some people were supposed to hate it because art is supposed to be subjective. It’s only worth making when there’s a plurality of opinions, good and bad. And it is possible that it’s not quite as good as you think it is: Harper Collins is not known for having the most on-the-job editorial staff. (Check out the Continent by Kiera Drake scandal if you don’t believe me.)


I’m currently completing my BFA at USC as well and just for clarity �� I’m a woman �� and I cannot stand it when girl screenwriters in my class go, “Male writers can’t write women.�� And my response was, “That’s funny the last script you turned in the lead character had sex with the chiselled ripped-up doctor by page three and just talked about it all the way after. Meanwhile the black guy over there had his female black lesbian throw a guy through a window on page 1.��

I have a feeling Aveyard probably belongs to that clique of writers that believe because a man wrote it it should be set on fire. She’s constantly bashing actors like Tom Hanks and other male screenwriters. (Don’t get this one: The thing is, she’s a screenwriter as well, someone who wants to work in Hollywood. Did, like, no one tell her that pissing off one of the big-name actors or people she could get a job from was, like, I don’t know �� a good way to never eat a hot meal ever again?)


There seems to be this growing fury and vindictive agenda of women writers pitting themselves against male writers, especially if the men catch a break. Why do that to people who don’t know you and have no idea who you are and have worked probably just as hard for their big break? If there are showrunners like Shonda Rhimes then there’s no excuse why no one else can be like her. And FYI, maybe there’d be more things like female producers and directors if they didn’t keep immaturely dropping out of Hollywood over “creative differences��.


Not to mention Kathleen Kennedy’s New York Time’s article a few months back that Star Wars doesn’t owe men anything, which is just a cruel thing to say—why does one group’s success hinge on another group’s complete eradication and extinction? One of my favourite movie critics, Grace Randolph, made a very insightful and thorough video here if you’d like to see it: .


I totally believe in sexism in the film industry but heckling people over Twitter who have gone further into the movie industry than you doesn’t really do much to fix the problem. If you want to change it you have to be productive. Work towards your own success. Write the stories you want to see and hire the people you want to see. Don’t knock male writers who have worked just as hard as you and perhaps harder to get their big break in the screenwriting business just because they’re men.


Just had to throw that out of the way before I got into the review.

Whew! Time to get in to the novel.

I didn’t realise I drifted so far off topic.


Sorry my peeps!


My major problem with this series is its glaring inconsistency. I think Aveyard is probably much suited to television than she is to blockbusters, because though she easily get’s that whole laying down the track for an oncoming train element of TV writing, this same ability really destroys any cohesiveness of her novel, where she manipulates time and events on the fly to suit her writing.




There are moments where you feel she’s changed the entire behaviour, attitude, and abilities of a character to service the plot and her endgame. For instance, in this book she says Mare was uneducated and how that lack of education is what keeps the Reds down in the dust, but in the first book when Shade sent a letter to her family she was the one who read it aloud.

And like Sarah J. Mass, Aveyard suffers profusely from what I call “Quotablity Syndrome��. With Sarah J. Mass I think it’s probably because she’s accustomed to fan-fiction (sometimes fan-fiction authors are hit and miss), but with Aveyard I think her problem originates with imagining every scene spoken aloud in the teaser trailer for the movie that Universal Studios has not even talked about. By that I mean that she is constantly focused on ensuring the words and passages sound euphonic, rather really understanding what she’s saying or taking a step back and realizing how dumb her character looks saying it. It’s what’s made Mare insufferable in both books. Here are some of my favourites from the past two books if you don’t believe me:

Glass Sword:

If I am a sword, I am a sword made of glass, and I feel myself beginning to shatter.

Anyone, anything, can betray anyone. Even your own heart.



And the romance:





This is always a huge problem for female writers. I see this all the time in class and when screenwriters and authors get defensive. They go: How dare you ship my characters the novel isn’t about romance! That is so sexist! And then I’m like: Dude, if you didn’t want shipping to happen then why did you have the main character make out with both the brothers? Unless you suffer from amnesia or are slightly unconscious at the helm of your laptop, you wrote that love triangle into the book Aveyard and it’s too late to change it now. If you didn’t want it to be about romance then don’t have them kiss. Have Mare be asexual or something! Don’t even bring it up! Make the brothers totally unattractive or that she’s too distracted with her situation, but when Mare spends every couple of pages tripping over these boys Mary Sue-style don’t expect people to not have readers ask you about the romance! You put it in your bloody book! I can see she was trying to make the novel like Reign from the CW, but it backfired and for some reason she’s not interested in it anymore. A pure sign of ill-plotting on her part. To be fair, Aveyard’s not alone. Female writers always trip themselves up on the romance. I think it’s just a habit. One that Aveyard is yet to break.


My feelings on Mare: ...I got nothing...



What I imagine must be that poor rebellion’s feelings on Mare at this point in the story and we're pretty much on the same page:




Yes. We get it already. You're imprisoned. After reading most of Aveyard’s oeuvre I wasn’t surprised to find that Mare continued being her hundred-watt-Mary-Sue old self. Aveyard has mechanized her to whine and complain every few pages, and say she is a bad-ass despite there being an enormous lack of evidence to support that theory.




Lastly, the plagiarism. Ah. This is a weird one. I’ve seen tonnes of more reviewers on ŷ������, of late, start to actually call authors out on it, which is great to finally start seeing. I think that to call something inspired instead of plagiarised is just changing the label to something more socially acceptable but it’s essentially the same thing. To be clear, Aveyard's work is not a heavy amalgamation of research and historical elements deftly woven into a fantasy threat like Martin's work.



If that was the case then I wouldn't have had a problem but there were some serious moments where I felt that it was a very narrow margin between plagiarism and not-plagiarism. I was surprised to see people finally call Veronica Roth out on it since she’s been pretty much immune her whole career. In Aveyard’s case, I think the plagiarism is pretty baseless; to me it’s not really plagiarism but rather really thick imitation of two novels: The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, which are all heavily embedded in her work—more like plastered all over—but in the kind of way that leads you to believe she thought she could make a shit tonne of money if she only changed stuff slightly around and fed it into a book about teenagers.

I think it's sad because this act alone really destroys books when you write by someone else's voice and imagination. In class they gave us this quote that I kept thinking about:



And it's true in this day and age originality sells above all else because people are tired of the same circulating plot which is why I think I just couldn't plug into King's Cage. With King's Cage, it just can't escape the gravity of its creative influences - unlike so many other books that can take the same idea but steer it down a whole different alleyway of implications.

There were just too many uncomfortably close moments where I was thinking to myself, That reminds me of something. And it wasn't just this novel but in Glass Sword there was the very glaring Peeta and Katniss bread reference with the coin where my jaw literally hit the floor—was she honestly stealing that scene from the Hunger Games. I mean…really! Really! What is YA these days, fan-fiction? [Scene: I remember the burdened boy who gave me a silver coin when I was nothing. With that one gesture he changed my future, and destroyed his own.] I think I just can’t forgive any more YA authors that steal work from the Hunger Games because I’m just fed up. Can people at least steal passages from a franchise I don’t read every Christmas? It's "not plagiarism" exactly, but it's not "originality" either, which makes it just awkward for me because I can't help think on some sort of spectrum that it's not entirely "the right thing" either.




I think this series is pretty dead in the water. Aveyard might have started off aiming high but it’s sunk to gliding, passionless mediocrity at this point. It’s lost a lot of its original WOW-factor. What’s sad about this series is what I’m finding sad about a lot of YA books these days. Good idea but poor execution and bad characters. This book, in my view, could have easily have scored a movie deal back before it was published but now I can understand why they never greenlit. First impressions are everything these days and Mare has just done too much damage to doctor at this point; and based on its sales it’s doing nowhere near the numbers to power a box office solely on its brand power.

You might have heard that the movie is being made. To be clear: the movie is ‘IN DEVELOPMENT�� which means that Aveyard is trying to channel as much buzz as she can by telling everyone they are making it. But with there having been no news in almost three years, Universal’s packed slate with Fast and Furious 8, Jurassic World 2, and a plethora of other movies lined up, I think Universal has probably passed by now. After all, Universal is one of the few companies that can challenge Disney for a seat in the billion dollar club; and I don’t see them jeopardising their outstanding reputation for a YA novel when book adaptations have shown to be pretty financially unsuccessful these days (just look at how the Divergent series died �� and Aveyard is repped by the same literary agency that reps Veronica Roth so there’s probably that conflict of interest for the studio execs).

Can this series be saved? I honestly don't know why but I'm going to pray that the 4th book is the charm here and keep my fingers crossed. Even if this series has bombed I'll be interested to see what projects Aveyard starts in the future.