Reading With Tyler

Name: To Cage A Wild Bird
Series: Divided Fates #1
Author: Brooke Fast
Publisher: Penguin
Format: Hardback
Genres: Adult, Dystopian, Fantasy, Romance, Science Fiction
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Review:

I have been struggling to write this review, and put it off for a while because I’m not sure how I feel about something.

I loved To Cage A Wild Bird. I thought the premise alone was amazing – in this world, there is a prison where those with the money to do so, can pay to go and hunt and kill an inmate – for fun, for sport. Our FMC finds out her younger brother has been arrested and sent to this prison, and so she has to get arrested to keep her brother alive and get them both out. But to do so she needs help, and this is where the resistance comes in – they’ll help on the inside if she gets someone out for them when she gets her and her brother out… of this prison that no one has escaped from…

I can’t explain how much I loved this – and the actual hunts in the arena!? They were brilliantly written – I could absolutely see this working on the silver screen. I loved the characters and the friendships too, our FMC is slow to trust anyone and understandably so! But this group of inmates win her over – and win me over too because believe me I was as nervous for something happening to them as I was for anything to happen to Raven!! And the romance, while not perfect, was enough that I have really high hopes for it being amazing in the next book… situation depending!!

But I struggled because I was getting an insane case of dejavu while reading this. I read an indie book last year that I loved, with the exception of the ending, that felt very similar to this. So similar in fact that at one point I was referring to the MMC with the name from this other book instead of his from TCAWB, for example… It pulled me out of the story on a number of occassions.

Now, I am hoping this is a case of mistaken memories and my brain sort of filling in gaps while trying to remember that book with pieces of this… But I already plan to reread that book this year as it got picked up for trad publishing and I want to finish the trilogy… so until I get to reread it, I’ll have to remain unsure… But I’ve just been conflicted on reviewing this since.

I’ve decided to act as if the similarities are more my brain playing tricks on me, and so I’m rating it as fairly as I can because I really did enjoy this! It probably would have been a 4.5 star if for the fact that there were a number of parts the felt predictiable or gave me the whole ‘oh of course’ reaction which I just don’t like being made to feel that way… And we’ll see if when I do that reread, whether it remains a 4 or if it drops again due to feeling like a copy of that other book.

This must be how some people felt while reading Powerless… I noticed comparisons to Red Queen when I read Powerless, but at no point did it pull me out of the story the way it did in To Cage A Wild Bird. I am really hoping that I’m wrong though, because I really did enjoy To Cage A Wild Bird.

“I suppose anyone foolish enough to cage a wild bird shouldn’t expect them to sing for their captor,”