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King's Cage (Red Queen, #3)

Victoria Aveyard

Start date: March 1, 2017

Finish date: March 31, 2017

Discussion: Series

Why we're reading this: Won the poll for the series in progress BOTM
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Series

* Continuing Series- Nightbane
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last updated Aug 12, 2025 07:32AM

* New Series- The Princess Trials
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What Members Thought

May 11, 2017 Lauren⁷ 💜 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, young-adult-teen-new-adult, library-has-a-copy, dystopian, fantasy-science-fiction

After how and where things ended with the previous book, Mare willingly turning herself over to Maven in exchange for the safety of her band of fellow newbloods (I think? It's been a while since I read the last book), I was dying to see where Victoria was going to take things in King's Cage. It opens with Mare still very much Maven's captive. I assumed that Victoria would write Mare as being rescued almost immediately, but she doesn't. In fact, Mare's time in captivity takes up a good portion of After how and where things ended with the previous book, Mare willingly turning herself over to Maven in exchange for the safety of her band of fellow newbloods (I think? It's been a while since I read the last book), I was dying to see where Victoria was going to take things in King's Cage. It opens with Mare still very much Maven's captive. I assumed that Victoria would write Mare as being rescued almost immediately, but she doesn't. In fact, Mare's time in captivity takes up a good portion of this book. She does, of course, mount a few escape attempts, but none are successful. She spends an awful lot of time with Maven and Victoria used that as a way to further develop Maven's character and delve into his psyche a bit. I found Mare's captivity to be a very effective plot pretense in that aspect. I'll tolerate one dimensional villains where it doesn't matter as much, see: many romantic suspense novel series where it's a new bad guy in each book. But I don't like one dimensional, mustache twirling cliché villains in dystopian, fantasy and sci-fi books. I find them to be extremely trite. It's not enough to tell me that a bad guy is bad and have him do bad things. No. I want to know. Why is he bad? What has turned him into a villain? What drives him? People seldom do bad things for the sheer heck of it. There's almost always a deeper reason and dadburn it, I want to know what those reasons are! And Victoria really developed Maven and gave tremendous insight into his character. And she further developed Mare and took her on quite the character journey. Mare is eventually rescued of course. And that's where things really start to kick into high gear. She's rescued by The Scarlet Guard and whisked back to their compound and that's where things get even more interesting. It all culminates in an utterly killer and mean cliffhanger! I really liked the plot and I thought it very nicely advanced the overall plot of the series and I truly can't wait to see how Victoria ties it all up. I loved the character development and interactions and the furthering of Cal and Mare's relationship. Those two. Sigh. But I can't believe Victoria left things on such a stinky cliffhanger! Waiting until February of next year to read it will be sheer agony! Even with that though, I loved this book so much and I most definitely recommend it. Now I'm going to tangent a bit. Can we talk about the covers? I really love the progression. How we went from an ordinary crown dripping red blood on the first book to a glass crown dripping silver blood on the second book to this cover. A crown made of bones and dripping both red and silver blood. I like to think it's a metaphor for how Cal has thrown his support quite firmly behind the Scarlet Guard and is helping them. ...more

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