To Cage a Wild Bird - Brooke Fast
- Kindig
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
TO CAGE A WILD BIRD
BROOKE FAST
***
A deadly prison. A forbidden romance. A fight for survival.
THERE’S ONLY ONE RULE IN ENDLOCK: OBEY OR DIE.
In Dividium, all crimes are punishable by life in prison. A prison that’s a life sentence in more ways than one. Where the wealthy can hunt the inmates for sport.
Raven’s mission is simple: infiltrate the infamous and deadly Endlock Prison to save her brother.
There’s just one problem: Raven has a target on her back. Her reputation as the most ruthless bounty hunter in Dividium precedes her, and the inmates she’s sent to Endlock want their revenge.
So when the prison guard she’s sworn to hate becomes her only chance to survive, Raven has no choice but to trust the one person she shouldn’t…
MY REVIEW
***
I have a bit of a soft spot for dystopian thrillers and particularly enjoy prison stories. The Prison Healer series by Lynette Noni was one of my favourite reads – so looking at the blurb for To Cage a Wild Bird by Brooke Fast I was excited to start reading!
Raven is a bounty hunter, but when her brother is sent to the infamous prison Endlock, where prisoners have to survive hunting from the general public, she decides to get caught and go in after him.
I would say that To Cage a Wild Bird is first and foremost a romance, which I had not quite anticipated when I picked it up. As it is a romance first, some of the world building and plot has holes you can drive a bus through, which was a shame. The romance between Raven and guard Vale is so obvious to absolutely everyone, with clandestine meetings which surely would have been completely see-through to the warden and yet they get away with it time and time again. The prison itself is quite badly described, and I struggled to picture what it looked like in places.
I loved the idea of the inmates being ranked based on how well they fought the general public who bought tickets to kill prisoners in a controlled environment. However, it surprised me just how many matches they had per day – there are 3 with up to 10 inmates per game, and this is apparently slowing down from what it used to be – do a lot of the general public want to murder people? Why are they worried about overpopulation of the prison? This many trials surely doesn’t match the intake for a prison - just how big is the city outside that it serves?
The writing also overuses various phrases – if I had to read ‘his eyes darkened’ one more time I was going to throw my Kindle out of the window. Raven leans into that trope of being young and good at absolutely everything with seemingly no flaws which felt unrealistic. Vale seems to instantly fall in love with her and despite only meeting her once seems happy to risk his job for her. This isn’t a ‘enemies to lovers’ or a slow-burn story, it’s just instant love.
All of this being said, I am intrigued to see how the story will pan out, but I worry without the setting of the prison, the characters that we are left with may not hold my interest for very long.
Overall, if you are expecting an action-packed prison thriller with a Hunger Games style undercurrent, as I was from the blurb, you will be disappointed. If you like your romance fast-paced with a dystopian setting and don’t want to examine the plot particularly closely, then you will be happy with this. Thank you to NetGalley & Transworld Publishers – Wayward TxF for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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