Uptown Oracle Reads… The Gilded King

In the Blue, the world’s last city, all is not well. Julia is trapped. She serves the nobility until she meets Lucas, a boy who believes in fairytales that Julia’s world can’t accommodate. The Blue is her prison, and she’d escape into the trees if she didn’t know that contamination and death awaited humanity outside. But not everyone in the Blue is human, and not everyone can be contained. In the wild forests of the Red, Cameron has precious little humanity left to lose. As he searches for a lost queen, he finds an enemy rising that he thought long dead. An enemy that the humans have forgotten how to fight. One way or another, the walls of the Blue are coming down. The only question is what side you’ll be on when they do.

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The Gilded King
Josie Jaffrey

The Gilded King is a wonderfully written vampire novel with a dystopian twist. Julia’s POV felt very much like the start of your average dystopian city where fear and misinformation has trapped you in the city. Whereas our other POV character, Cam, has a much more action packed fantasy role as a vampire.

Both characters had their own stories in this book, and I was waiting and waiting for them to merge. But they only came across one another once, for a few seconds really. This felt strange to me, because the stories clearly had such different objectives and felt like it could have been two separate books.

I still feel quite confused about why we even followed Julia’s POV. I understand that there were some snippets that were there for backstory and insight into the Blue, but it made the book feel like a whole half was purely there for the romance plot-line. And of course, this made it slow reading for me.

Cam’s POV however was much better for the pace of the book. I enjoyed his journey across the continent, and the struggles he faced. As a ‘Silver’ we got to see how vampires worked in this universe, and the limitations they had. There’s a lot of backstory for vampires, such as the Fall and the Silvering process which were great for world building.

I could say that our antagonists in the book aren’t really seen much. There’s a lot of misdirection and politics within the nobles which makes it difficult to understand who’s good and bad. There’s a lot of mystery and it was fun to guess who was against our protagonists or not (and also to find out if you’re right about someone!)

I really enjoyed how the Blue was portrayed throughout, with the different classes of nobles, and how human’s are now kept more like livestock and slaves. The way we were shown this through Julia’s eyes was actually really helpful for world building (even though most or her chapters weren’t as interesting). So because of this, the world felt very well full even though we didn’t really see that much of it. There was also history and myths that were talked about throughout which gives a more thorough view of this world.

I enjoyed The Gilded King as a whole, and I’m super excited for the second book after having so many questions at the end. The unique take of vampires, and what would happen if they took over was a pleasant surprise for me, so I’m sure the second book will be just as interesting.

Positives

+ Unique vampires

+ Mystery and misdirection

+ World building

Negatives

– One POV is more interesting than the other

I received The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey from the author. This is an unbiased and honest review