Poison's Cage by Breeana Shields

genre: young adult fantasy

As we read in Poison's Kiss, Marinda has the power to kill with a kiss.  Now that she knows who her true enemy is, she is prepared to sacrifice everything to bring down the Snake King.  Well, not everything.  Not Mani, her little brother or Ilya, her childhood friend that Marinda isn't completely sure she can trust.  Being a spy isn't for the faint of heart and Marinda soon learns that not only will she have to deceive someone she both fears and hates, even she might not recognize who she becomes.

So, I liked that this book was from both Marinda and Ilya's perspectives - it kept the story moving and Ilya is an intriguing character with a lot of emotional baggage to sort through.  There are some heavyish ideas here about family and loyalty.  However, I just had so so many questions that never were answered - questions that made me never feel firmly in the world our author created.  I actually made a list of them, hoping by the end I'd understand more but alas, not so much.  I hate spoilers so I won't include him but some of them were really important to the plot - but here's one that's not.  All the characters were constantly moving between places and nearly everywhere they went, at any time, took hours.  Hours of running.  Hours of stumbling with your hands tied behind you back.  Hours of hiking.  An hour is a really long time and to say you "ran for two hours" in the darkness, when you're a person who has never really mentioned that you're a runner, just makes me wonder how that's possible, it pulls me out of the story.  I know I'm a picky reader, but when I'm jarred by something that just doesn't sit right, the I have a harder time suspending my disbelief and letting my mind be settled into the story.  That's a bummer to me, because it's not a badly written. Some of the plots twists at the end were really good - if only the climax wasn't so full of plotholes.  I think if you weren't as picky as me, you could still enjoy the story for what it is.