Gilded Cage by Vic James

[MerryLove]

This book has a very high chance of being my favorite book for all of 2017! It was so amazing! I haven't read a book this good in a long time. I absolutely loved it, from beginning to end. While it is the first in the series (it will be a trilogy), it didn't read like a first book of more to come. By the end I could tell there would be a sequel, but the whole time I was reading the book I thought that it very well could be a standalone novel. The story was written that well. It felt complete in itself, yet left me so in love with the gray areas of the situation and intrigued by the characters that I will be highly anticipating its sequel.

In this dystopian fantasy, the Equals (people with magical abilities) hold all the power. They control the government and make all of the decisions. The common people, who have little rights to begin with, must spend 10 years of their life as a slave and give up their rights completely during that time. Abi manages to apply for her entire family, including her younger brother and sister, to do their slave days together on the estate of an Equals' family. However, it is not as great an achievement as it originally seems. Her brother, Luke, gets denied and is sent to work in a backbreaking slave town instead, while working on the estate is definitely different than the family imagined.

From these two places, the story does an excellent job of painting the picture and viewpoints from the Equals, from the position of servants living on the estate, and from those working in the slave towns. Everything flows seamlessly together in a way that left me seeking more and becoming enraptured with the world and the characters. It was great to get to see from all of the different perspectives, and that element itself is one of the key things that made this book so great. I found myself enjoying both sides, not just one or the other. (If I had to pick favorites, I would say Luke and Silyen are my two favorite character story lines!)

The political conniving, the plight of the common people, and the bonds between the characters left me wanting more at every check point. Like a good dystopian should, I was left mourning the injustices occurring to the people and yearning for characters to act on it. Another thing I loved about this particular dystopian is the time spent on the oppressors. I got to know not only the common people affected by this situation, but those with the power to do something about it and blatantly refused to. Gilded Cage doesn't work in shades of black and white, but instead with many hues of gray.


Rating

I adored this book. I know I will read it many more times to come. I give it a full 4 out of 4. I would highly recommend it to any fans of dystopian worlds in particular, but it is so good that I would suggest it to many, many others as well.