Sometimes when I'm sitting on the couch at night reading, loopy with exhaustion, I look over at my cats and start thinking about how weird it is that they're sentient beings who have feelings and communicate in ways that I will never understand. Then I pass out with my book on my face. But if you are like me and have a hard enough time grasping animal consciousness, then you will probably also have a hard time taking seriously the idea that a prison is not only a sentient being but wants to build a human body to escape -- from itself.

That is one of the story lines in Sapphique, which I hadn't planned to read upon finishing Incarceron until my YA book club's fabulous discussion of that book. We were all curious: Would Keiro and Attia ever escape the prison too? Is Finn Giles? Is the Sapphique mythology just a myth or a true story? Would anything ever come of Jared and Claudia's father/brother/lover relationship (as we had all taken to calling it)? Emphasis on lover, because that's what about half of us wanted to happen and half of us thought was icky. I'll let you guess which camp I fall into. If you know my thoughts regarding smart older men, it shouldn't be too tough.

I want to be nice because the last chapter of this book is really fabulous and moving and tricky; after reading it, I wanted immediately to rate the book higher than it deserves. Some of the images are executed very well -- I loved the dark carnival feel of the opening scenes featuring Rix and Attia, previewed at the end of Incarceron -- and Fisher's prose continues to be rich and poetic, compared to the blander norms of YA writing.

But, in the interest of honesty, the book is a mess. Fisher has got so much mad genius subterfuge going on here that I had to keep flipping back through the pages, wondering if I had missed something or if a twist really had come out of nowhere. There's bouncing back and forth many times per chapter, from Keiro and Attia in the prison trying to find the portal to escape, to Finn and Claudia trying to prove to both the Realm and themselves that Finn is the rightful Heir to the throne, to Jared researching the portal himself, to Incarceron (hilariously) wanting to escape itself. I tired quickly of how much action was happening, but how little these subsequent plots were being furthered as the pages piled up, how little the characters I'd grown to like by the end of the first book were developed. To reference a metaphor from the book: yeah, I guess they were all just pawns after all.

Pawns to what purpose? I couldn't even tell you. I can't imagine how others have digested this book amidst the convoluted layers. Is it a noble cause to want to stop Incarceron from abandoning itself, leaving its prisoners to die without food and warmth, as Attia wants? Sure. And once you get past the silliness of a prison wanting to escape itself, it's cool to think about the idea of artificial intelligence becoming so intelligent that it wants its own freedom. I would read another book about that -- one that gives the idea more space and me more breathing time to think it through before sending me into some inconsequential sword fight with a (regrettably, not ass-to-mouth) human centipede or a climb up or down yet another chain-link ladder for what seems like 50 pages or whatever.