YA SF, The Cage, Megan Shepherd

The Cage
Megan Shepherd
ISBN: 9780062243058
First in a trilogy:  Cora, along with five other teens, wakes in a crazed warped-spacetime funhouse designed to superficially resemble various cultures and biospheres on Earth.

This was an interesting read, and a really good example of how to have a solid, tight, COMPLETE storyline and climax, while still leaving lots of good space for the remainder of the trilogy.

Cora is a solid character, and she attempts to befriend the others in the menagerie, but their own complacency and the capricious nature of their captors (zookeepers?) keeps her apart from them.  I really liked how Shepherd made Cora fight, mentally and physically, against their captivity, even when her actions weren't helpful or were actively hampered by the rest of the group.  Nice to see a really powerful girl kick back against the "victim" mentality.  

My one major quibble is that the kids are supposedly meant to represent human diversity, yet there are no black characters at all.  There are two darker-skinned girl characters, but one is dead before the story begins (which is unfortunately stereotypical) and the other is introduced as a crazed feral creature (which is also unfortunately stereotypical), and the one male "ethnic" boy is Polynesian or Maori - Pacific Islander, instead of black.  There is one other Asian character, and the remaining three (also the most important three for the majority of the story) are white.  On the one hand, I hate to dock a book because of casting choices, but when the premise is established as specifically as this was, it's a little noticeable when fully half of your "genetically diverse" menagerie is made of lily-white people, when the actual demographics of planet Earth are fundamentally different.  I was left with the stunning realization that if Cora herself had been a black girl, the story would have been in large part the same, but with an even more powerful engine behind her drive to never be a victim.  I have to think that alternate-universe version would be even more amazing.

Still, the book ends with our character group divided and split up, with the promise of more potential characters to add to the mix.  It's scheduled for May next year, and I'm already looking forward to it.

For people who want to read an entire trilogy at once with no waiting, I would highly suggest Shepherd's earlier trilogy; The Madman's Daughter, Her Dark Curiosity, A Cold Legacy.