Hayley ☾ (TheVillainousReader)'s Reviews > The Caged Queen

I know the sophomore slump is a thing but..

D A Y U M.

This was truly awful. Wow.

The one positive about this book was that there were still old stories woven throughout, expanding the world and deepening understanding, but even those were not nearly as good or magical as in the first book. Everything else was. Oof. Bad.

Roa was like a lamb, all cute and dumb and ready to be slaughtered. Except it was even worse because she thought she was the wolf even though it was CLEAR that she had no idea what she was doing. She spent the entire book bumbling around like an idiot and alienating herself from all the other characters, which was sad for me because then I was stuck with just her. Ugh. When she wasn't doing that she was just hating on Dax for something that happened when they were eight, and that he truly had no control over. AND WHEN SHE WASN'T DOING THAT, she was being all jealous and pissy that he was flirting with other people. And when that wasn't happening she was just thinking about how much she hated him. But the whole time, no matter what she was doing, she sucked. Her character was flat and her thought process made no sense to me, I didn't see any development and being in her head gave me some serious whiplash.

The romance was really none existent and by 80% it still hadn't been developed or really introduced. But don't worry, by 90% Roa was I N L O V E with Dax, or she realized she had loved him the whole time? Honestly, I really don't know. At this point I had sped it up to 2x and was barely paying attention because I was too busy praying for it to end.

The plot was all over the place which is unfortunate because it was a cool concept. The whole book was pretty much just listening to Roa go around and around in her head, and then attempting to complete some tasks but not. She was the most obvious traitor/spy to exist. Ever. Everything was so obvious to me and yet... She was an idiot. A whole lot of nothing happened throughout this and listening to it was exhausting.

This was overall just so bland and boring, and annoying which is sad because I really enjoyed the first one. Will definitely have to take a break before I start the last, which I'm assuming is another companion novel and I'm not very excited about that.