But it's a strange balance between past and present. Lowachee switches back and forth between these two chronologies, gradually bringing the past up the point where we understand how Yuri got imprisoned. Stuck in a refugee camp on some other planet, lonely and without many prospects, he's easy prey for pirate recruiters. After a devastating attack by the aliens, his home world is evacuated and in the ensuing chaos his family loses track of his mother. Then the story jumps back to Yuri as a four year old, living happily with his family on a colonial world. Yuri will get out of prison if he agrees to infiltrate the pirate network and pass along intelligence about his former comrades. A Black Ops agent comes to him to make a deal.

The first 50 pages show how much of a tight spot he is in. The main character, Yuri, is 22 when his story starts, and he's in a military prison for his crimes as a pirate. Cagebird completes the trio with a look at the life of a boy who becomes a member of the crew of a pirate vessel.Ĭagebird is also more structurally complex than the previous two books.

Warchild followed a boy who got caught up in the battle with the aliens (on both sides), while Burndive was about a boy whose father captained a military ship but whose life was not necessarily any less psychologically grueling.

The stereotypical space opera cares more about the pace of the plot than the people involved, and Lowachee has subverted that expectation in each of these three books. The broader background of these stories is a kind of modified space opera, in which space pirates, military capital ships, and aliens all mix it up in the outer reaches of the galaxy. I have my doubts about whether this approach is a productive one, and I'll examine this question later in this review.Ĭagebird resembles Warchild and Burndive in another way: all three books are intense psychological portraits, the type of characterization that is simply not found all that often in science fiction. Another example of this approach would be Orson Scott Card's revisiting of the Ender's Game universe with a character who was formerly in a supporting role. Cagebird follows closely in the steps of Warchild and Burndive - this is not a prequel or a sequel as such things are defined, but rather a book that takes place in an overlapping time period from the point of view of a different character. Cagebird, Karin Lowachee, Warner Aspect, 2005, 429 pp.Ĭagebird is Karin Lowachee's third novel, following her award-winning debut, Warchild, and a related second novel, Burndive.

Cagebird by Karin Lowachee