A review by misssusan
Cagebird by Karin Lowachee

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