King's Cage by Victoria Aveyard

King's Cage by Victoria Aveyard

Third Book in the Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard

 

(taken from Amazon.com)

When the goddess Artemis goes missing, she is believed to have been kidnapped. And now it's up to Percy and his friends to find out what happened. Who is powerful enough to kidnap a goddess? They must find Artemis before the winter solstice, when her influence on the Olympian Council could swing an important vote on the war with the titans. Not only that, but first Percy will have to solve the mystery of a rare monster that Artemis was hunting when she disappeared-a monster rumored to be so powerful it could destroy Olympus forever.

Like the preceding two books in the series, King's Cage continues with the same heavy-handed symbolic language that resounds like a dull, pounding headache in the mind of the reader. It seems that Aveyard cannot resist ending nearly ever paragraph with some resounding sentence of gravity; however, the overkill of dramatic language ultimately causes the lines that should deliver a punch to fall flat. The same themes are drilled over and over--Mare re-declares Maven a monster nearly every chapter for the entire book, as though this is some remarkable new insight.

Not only is the book far too long due to its excessive symbolic language, but it wastes nearly half of its pages without any plot development. Chapter after chapter continues with its focus on Mare's captivity, with the only real action occurring elsewhere. And what was the point of her failed escape attempt? I couldn't understand why bother to detail that scene when it completely failed to advance neither the characters nor the plot, and just pages later, it's completely forgotten by everyone.

Finally, I found the changes in point-of-view to be unbalanced. The character who narrate seem to be chosen at random as necessary to convey events. I think the narration would have been far more successful had it been consistent in choosing and switching with intention between narrators, and if only a handful of chapters had been put in Mare's perspective. Instead, we spend an excessive amount of time watching her do nothing as everything goes on outside her, and then get a haphazard switch to a couple of other, rather minor, characters, which is off-putting.

Overall Rating: 3 / 10 Stars 

I had hoped these books would improve with time, but they seem to go the other way. This final volume is not only agonizingly slow, but it portrays a sudden change in the main character toward the end that is obviously intended to make the reader sympathize with and like her better, but which really just seems contrived and fake.