Keep This One Caged

My brain hurts thanks to this book. Megan Shepherd's The Cage is pretty twisted. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure if I liked it or not. The concept was really cool- Cora, an American girl, and five other international sixteen-year-olds are abducted by aliens called the Kindred. They wake up in a freakish world that contains a desert, a jungle, a farm, and other biomes that don't really mesh. All Cora wants to do is escape for this strange world that makes her brain hurt. But the odd climates and the stores in the tiny hodgepodge town are full of puzzles. The six are supposed to solve them, and follow three rules. If they don't follow all three within 21 days, they will be "removed". Without my giving anything away, Cora does everything she can do to escape before the 21-day mark. 

Overall, sounds cool, right? It was more of an "eh" for me. For some reason, while the majority of the chapters are told from Cora's perspective, every few is from the POV of a different character. It made the story vaguely confusing. The twists and turns of the plot are fairly decent, though I think some of them could have been more dramatic and effective. Some of the writing just felt... simple? As in, a lot of the same descriptive words were repeated, or similar ones were used a lot. I felt the descriptions could have been more vivid and rich. The plot struggled occasionally- Cora's feelings and ideas were examined to great lengths, and repetitively, and it made the plot drag in places. By the end I wasn't sure if I sympathized with Cora or thought she was kind of dumb.

All in all, the plot of this tale was intriguing and is what really kept me reading. The writing is at about par- nothing spectacular, but passable. In the end, it's a thoroughly okay summer read.

(picture courtesy of bookwormdreams.com)