ARC Review: The Verdant Cage by Jess Lourey

“We all wake up at different times and for different reasons. What matters is what we do after we hear the call.”

Notice: thank you to BookSparks for providing me an advanced reader copy of this book. This does not affect my opinion.

The Wall was built to keep them safe. Or so they thought.

For as long as seventeen-year-old apothecary Rose Allgood can remember, the towering stone Wall surrounding Noah’s Valley has protected her people. No one leaves. No one fights. And no one questions why.

But their paradise has been hiding its thorns. When Rose’s mother becomes the Valley’s first murder victim and her twin brother is swiftly condemned, she alone is searching for the real killer. Determined to find the truth, she follows a trail of hidden messages, forbidden knowledge, and whispers of a past no one dares to remember.

The deeper she digs, the more certain Rose becomes that her mother’s death was no accident. That the Wall isn’t just keeping something out.

It’s keeping something in.

Fans of The Hunger Games, The Grace Year, and The Maze Runner will devour The Verdant Cage―a chilling dystopian thriller about what it takes to rebel when you discover your entire world is a lie.

It has been quite awhile since I jumped into a thriller book, so I was eager to read this title when it was pitched to me to review an advanced reader’s copy.

Eleven years of reading and writing book reviews has honed my ability to view things from a “yes, and” perspective. I think that ten years ago, I would have loved this book like I loved The Young Elites series when I was actually sixteen. I’m turning twenty six this year, and I’m finding that I am aging out of being the target audience for young adult books. So while I feel as though I did not connect with this book as much as I would have as a sixteen or seventeen year old would, it has unique qualities that kept me reading until the end. So let’s talk about them.

“A person in power choosing to do nothing in the face of injustice is a million times worse than a teenager misbehaving.”

Despite not being particularly moved by the plot of this novel, I do love a book that presents the opportunity to do analyze its allegorical message. (It’s the AP Literature nerd in me that still shines through all of these years later). Like The Grace Year by Kim Liggett, The Verdant Cage is a psychological thriller that begins with our main character, Rose Allgood, noticing the ever so fine cracks in the way society as she knows it functions. It begins with innocuous questions of why, and ends with full-on bloodshed. While I believe this title absolutely fumbles the “show, don’t tell” aspect of storytelling (because trust me, there is a LOT of repetition in this book), I also think it resonates with who Rose Allgood is as a member of the Noah’s Valley society. It speaks to how intense her social conditioning was to follow the rules without question growing up. How reality-shattering it can be when you are not taught to think critically, and then suddenly stumble upon information that makes you question your place and role in a larger entity for the first time.

So yes, this book is repetitive and makes a lot of obvious connections for you, and I think it is actually appropriate when you view the story from the main character’s perspective.

I generally believe that this book has a great message for youth that blind deference to the status quo is how atrocity happens. It is good to question why. It is good to think critically about information that has shaped you your whole life. Caring for others is paramount to surviving harsh, oppressive times.

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a timely message to me.

The end of this book positions it to become a series. I don’t think this is a series I’m invested in enough to follow, but if you’re looking for a fast-paced, young adult psychological thriller book to sink your teeth into, this is the book for you. Happy Publishing Day to The Verdant Cage!