The Cage by Megan Shepherd

One second Cora’s in the car with her brother driving to meet their parents at a ski resort. Next thing she knows, she’s waking up in a desert in someone else’s clothes.

This book is CRAZY right from the beginning. I guess in the Goodreads summary, you find out right away that Cora and the others have been abducted by an alien race. I did not know that coming into this book. So when the aliens are introduced I was just like, “Umm….okay….well, I guess I’ll see how this plays out…” As you can tell by all of the ellipses, there was a lot of hesitation on my part, but I think it turned out pretty good. I’m not really a big Sci-Fi/Alien reader so I just wasn’t sure whether this would be my kind of thing.

Right off the bat, the reader and the characters are all really confused (maybe I would have been less confused if I’d read the summary more carefully, but I didn’t). The story is told from multiple perspectives so we’re privy to private information about the characters that the other characters don’t know yet. The voices of the characters were all pretty distinctive, so that was nice. I hate when you have multiple perspectives, but the voices are all the same so you can’t tell them apart.

The whole situation that these characters are in makes the reader pretty uneasy. I mean, these humans are basically being treated like animals and that can be a bit unnerving. It really made me think about how I would react in this situation. Would I be like Cora and try to escape? Or would I just accept my fate and play games all day?

Even though I enjoyed the book, I didn’t find any of the characters to be particularly likable. Nok and Rolf were both pretty annoying to me. We don’t see too much of Leon or Mali so I’m still up in the air about them. Lucky is okay but kind of weak as a person (which I find unappealing in a character). And then there’s Cora…she’s okay, but she does a lot of freaking out throughout the book. I just don’t know how I feel about her. Mostly I just need her to calm down and be a little more rational about things.

Overall, I did like this book. I know my review kind of sounds negative, but there were a lot of things to like. There’s a big plot twist at the end that I totally did NOT see coming. Like, it’s so big that I wanted to immediately reread the book with this new information in mind. The book was just kind of lacking in character development. As it is, even though the book itself is great, the characters just felt kind of flat to me.

Overall Rating: 4
Language: Mild
Violence: Moderate
Sexual Content: Heavy, but it’s mostly in a breeding context. No explicit scenes.
Smoking/Drinking: Moderate