Cagebird Book

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.