lautreamont's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
loved the first half, hooked in the middle, last 50 pages too rushed and confusing
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Pedophilia, and Rape
Moderate: Self harm
schrikes's review against another edition
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
thisbeereads's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
misssusan's review against another edition
4.0
oh geez. look, it's not as though the other books in this series are light reads, lowachee is looking at what happens to children growing up in wartime and she deals with child abuse and ptsd in the first two books too but like. i think my skin crawled more in this volume then in any of the rest combined. all the scenes with kid yuri had me internally screaming because frigging child grooming pirates, the way they pushed at his boundaries and took advantage of his desire for affection and a home and URGH. i wanted a shower and the ability to pull child protective services into a book.
this is not necessarily a disrecommendation but i do think it's only fair to warn you that this book is incredibly intense and incredibly fucked up in equal measure
so yeah, final book of our trilogy takes on pirates, it follows yuri kirov, protege to falcone, the pirate villain we first meet in warchild. he...does not have a great time of things. but hey, he does get a sort of love story and redemption plot and he's out of the criminal business by the end so. it's an upward trajectory overall?
(i don't consider saying he gets out as a spoiler, i feel it is a net social good to reassure the reader that things do in fact get better eventually)
i don't even know what to say guys, i've been immersed in warchild headspace for the past two days and now i'm out. this was a rough ride to end on but i'm glad of it. 4 stars
this is not necessarily a disrecommendation but i do think it's only fair to warn you that this book is incredibly intense and incredibly fucked up in equal measure
so yeah, final book of our trilogy takes on pirates, it follows yuri kirov, protege to falcone, the pirate villain we first meet in warchild. he...does not have a great time of things. but hey, he does get a sort of love story and redemption plot and he's out of the criminal business by the end so. it's an upward trajectory overall?
(i don't consider saying he gets out as a spoiler, i feel it is a net social good to reassure the reader that things do in fact get better eventually)
i don't even know what to say guys, i've been immersed in warchild headspace for the past two days and now i'm out. this was a rough ride to end on but i'm glad of it. 4 stars
thistlechaser's review against another edition
3.0
Cagebird starts out much like Warchild did: A young boy's home colony is destroyed as part of the war, and he (eventually) ends up in the hands of a pirate. Because of that, this book really worked for me at first, and I had high hopes for it. (I love plots about brainwashing and trust issues, not to mention age and power differences in relationships.) Unfortunately, it veered off into quite a different direction than Warchild did.
Yuri, the boy in question, is sent to a refugee camp. The story focuses on that for a time, how hard the conditions are there, how society often doesn't have the care or resources to help war refugees.
Pirates have taken advantage of the disadvantaged for a long time, picking up children from them to use or sell. A pirate shows up at Yuri's refugee camp, and picks him and others to take back to his ship.
Turns out the pirate is the same captain as took Jos in book #1.
The pirate captain, Falcone, trains Yuri as he had Jos. But, unlike Jos, Yuri doesn't escape the life. Yuri embraces it. Sort of. Through the book he tries to escape a the pirate life a couple times, but that's easier said than done.
While I had loved the worldbuilding in the previous books, in this one it took a sharp left turn. In this book we learned the pirates have geisha -- beautiful boys and girls who are trained both as whores and assassins. I had a couple of issues with this. The alien world is strongly Japanese-y, so the pirates (humans) having geisha made me scratch my head. Why not come up with some other, non-Japanese word for it? The second and larger issue I had was... pirate geisha? The two ideas just don't work together in my head. The pirates had this whole geisha culture going on, and it just never fit with the idea of 'pirate'.
The other big issue I had with this book was that Yuri cut himself. It makes sense he'd be stressed as hell and have all sorts of issues, but the whole cutting thing felt seriously heavy-handed I just never believed it. (He cut himself to let the "scarlet plague" out.)
I didn't buy the Falcone character in this book either, sadly.
While I did enjoy parts of the story (all of the sections about young Yuri worked for me), all in all, I struggled to enjoy this book.
Yuri, the boy in question, is sent to a refugee camp. The story focuses on that for a time, how hard the conditions are there, how society often doesn't have the care or resources to help war refugees.
Pirates have taken advantage of the disadvantaged for a long time, picking up children from them to use or sell. A pirate shows up at Yuri's refugee camp, and picks him and others to take back to his ship.
Turns out the pirate is the same captain as took Jos in book #1.
The pirate captain, Falcone, trains Yuri as he had Jos. But, unlike Jos, Yuri doesn't escape the life. Yuri embraces it. Sort of. Through the book he tries to escape a the pirate life a couple times, but that's easier said than done.
While I had loved the worldbuilding in the previous books, in this one it took a sharp left turn. In this book we learned the pirates have geisha -- beautiful boys and girls who are trained both as whores and assassins. I had a couple of issues with this. The alien world is strongly Japanese-y, so the pirates (humans) having geisha made me scratch my head. Why not come up with some other, non-Japanese word for it? The second and larger issue I had was... pirate geisha? The two ideas just don't work together in my head. The pirates had this whole geisha culture going on, and it just never fit with the idea of 'pirate'.
The other big issue I had with this book was that Yuri cut himself. It makes sense he'd be stressed as hell and have all sorts of issues, but the whole cutting thing felt seriously heavy-handed I just never believed it. (He cut himself to let the "scarlet plague" out.)
I didn't buy the Falcone character in this book either, sadly.
While I did enjoy parts of the story (all of the sections about young Yuri worked for me), all in all, I struggled to enjoy this book.
serru's review against another edition
5.0
This was quite a difficult read and vastly different from the two previous books in the series, in terms of the character's psychology and internal voice. Like Jos from [b:Warchild|184786|Warchild (Warchild, #1)|Karin Lowachee|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344270885s/184786.jpg|178604], Yuri had also been taken by the space pirate Falcon and made into a protege, however, he turned out very different from the experience. Where Jos refuses to acknowledge the abuse he suffered at the hands of Falcone, Yuri talks fairly candidly about what he's been through, making this book absolutely brutal and heartbreaking at parts. Still, the novel is incredibly engrossing, and Karin Lowachee is excellent at writing damaged characters without portraying them as mere victims.
The characters and relationships in this book were handled with such nuance and complexity for the most part. In particular, really loved the relationship between Yuri and Finch, although it is not clear why Yuri is so attached to Finch-- in some ways I felt that he was replacing Estienne with Finch as his new anchor. It would be interesting to see how their relationship develops or changes in the future as Yuri heals from his past.
The characters and relationships in this book were handled with such nuance and complexity for the most part. In particular, really loved the relationship between Yuri and Finch, although it is not clear why Yuri is so attached to Finch-- in some ways I felt that he was replacing Estienne with Finch as his new anchor. It would be interesting to see how their relationship develops or changes in the future as Yuri heals from his past.
susanneanne's review against another edition
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Pedophilia, and Sexual assault
kaje_harper's review against another edition
5.0
This is the third book in the series. All the books deal with a futuristic far-flung interstellar society where the best and worst of humanity have room to expand. In all three books there is kidnapping, murder, indifference to suffering and childhood sexual abuse so be warned. This book is the best of the three, with the main character I felt most connected to and cared the most about. Yuri's struggles to become someone worthwhile, his love for another man in spite of all attempts to prevent becoming attached, his scars and flaws, gripped me all the way through. And since I like SF, the combination has had me rereading the series once and this one more than once.
annux's review against another edition
4.0
I'm a little surprised at how graphic this book is, although I suppose I shouldn't be. The previous books aren't exactly a walk in the park; this one, however, makes them look mild by contrast. At any rate, it is quite good! All three books in this series are a solid four stars for me, which is impressively consistent quality. Yuri is more fun as a POV character than Ryan, and the romance between Yuri and Finch is nice, especially since basically everything else that happens is horrifying and sad. This book also has less slow bits than its predecessors; the only time things get a little draggy is toward the end when we re-experience some of the events of Burndive through Yuri's eyes. It's overall a satisfying read, and I am very much anticipating the next installment in the series, which I hear is tentatively titled Warboy.
coolcurrybooks's review against another edition
3.0
Trigger warning: rape, self harm, child abuse, child grooming…
Cagebird is the third novel in Karin Lowachee’s science fiction series exploring how a war psychologically impacts boys. The series starts with Warchild, which I still believe to be the best in the series. While each book has a different protagonist, I would recommend reading them in order.
At the age of four, Yuri Kirov’s home was destroyed in one of the initial attacks in the war between the humans/alien war. When the pirates found him, he was a child refugee who became trained as Falcone’s protege. Now at twenty-two he is a killer and a criminal serving out a life sentence on Earth. Then two men from the Black Ops decide that they’d rather Yuri return to the pirates to be their spy and weapon, but their plan puts him in more danger than ever.
In my review of Warchild I talked about how brutal and uncomfortable to read the book was. This is even more so for Cagebird, and at a certain point it just became too much. There are multiple, explicit rape scenes, all taking place before Yuri is fifteen. I question the necessity of showing such graphic scenes, especially as they were all flashbacks and not part of the current narrative.
Speaking of flashbacks, it felt like they comprised the majority of the book. I felt that this had the effect of putting the focus on all the horrible things that had happened in Yuri’s past instead of on a healing arc, which ended up feeling skimped. For a book where one of the end messages is “look to your future not your past,” Cagebird sure did spend a lot of time on the graphic details of Yuri’s past.
The current timeline did have a lot of promise, but I feel that much of it was underdeveloped. Take Finch’s character – he played such a large role in Yuri’s arc but he never felt like he was well characterized and developed. He seems to only exist in connection to Yuri.
So why did this book cross the three star mark? Because whatever the faults of the book, Karin Lowachee can write. She immediately establishes Yuri as having a distinctive voice, and I did end up feeling like I understood and sympathized with him, which from what I knew about him going in, I wasn’t sure would happen. There’s also some value in the messages of the current timeline, such as “you can get acclimatized to any environment, but it doesn’t mean the environment is a good one.”
What it comes down to is this: Does Cagebird‘s good points outweigh the focus on the sheer brutality? For me, it didn’t, and it’s not a book I’m going to ever reread. On the other hand, I am willing to continue with the series if Lowachee ever publishes a fourth book. I would still recommend Warchild and Burndive but I would advice anyone contemplating Cagebird to be aware of their own limits before starting.
Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
Cagebird is the third novel in Karin Lowachee’s science fiction series exploring how a war psychologically impacts boys. The series starts with Warchild, which I still believe to be the best in the series. While each book has a different protagonist, I would recommend reading them in order.
At the age of four, Yuri Kirov’s home was destroyed in one of the initial attacks in the war between the humans/alien war. When the pirates found him, he was a child refugee who became trained as Falcone’s protege. Now at twenty-two he is a killer and a criminal serving out a life sentence on Earth. Then two men from the Black Ops decide that they’d rather Yuri return to the pirates to be their spy and weapon, but their plan puts him in more danger than ever.
In my review of Warchild I talked about how brutal and uncomfortable to read the book was. This is even more so for Cagebird, and at a certain point it just became too much. There are multiple, explicit rape scenes, all taking place before Yuri is fifteen. I question the necessity of showing such graphic scenes, especially as they were all flashbacks and not part of the current narrative.
Speaking of flashbacks, it felt like they comprised the majority of the book. I felt that this had the effect of putting the focus on all the horrible things that had happened in Yuri’s past instead of on a healing arc, which ended up feeling skimped. For a book where one of the end messages is “look to your future not your past,” Cagebird sure did spend a lot of time on the graphic details of Yuri’s past.
The current timeline did have a lot of promise, but I feel that much of it was underdeveloped. Take Finch’s character – he played such a large role in Yuri’s arc but he never felt like he was well characterized and developed. He seems to only exist in connection to Yuri.
So why did this book cross the three star mark? Because whatever the faults of the book, Karin Lowachee can write. She immediately establishes Yuri as having a distinctive voice, and I did end up feeling like I understood and sympathized with him, which from what I knew about him going in, I wasn’t sure would happen. There’s also some value in the messages of the current timeline, such as “you can get acclimatized to any environment, but it doesn’t mean the environment is a good one.”
What it comes down to is this: Does Cagebird‘s good points outweigh the focus on the sheer brutality? For me, it didn’t, and it’s not a book I’m going to ever reread. On the other hand, I am willing to continue with the series if Lowachee ever publishes a fourth book. I would still recommend Warchild and Burndive but I would advice anyone contemplating Cagebird to be aware of their own limits before starting.
Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.