The Gilded King Book Review

The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey

From Goodreads: In the Blue, the world’s last city, all is not well.

Julia is stuck within its walls. She serves the nobility from a distance until she meets Lucas, a boy who believes in fairytales that Julia’s world can’t accommodate. The Blue is her prison, not her castle, 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.

Beyond the city’s boundaries, 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.

Thanks so much to the author for sending me an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a review.

I don’t often post reviews of indie books, mostly because my TBR is so long that I never get around to much exploring on Amazon and other places I might discover new things. So I was very excited when I read the synopsis of this book and was invited to join the street team.

The Gilded King starts out really strong with a lot of intrigue and gorgeous descriptions. I was immediately drawn into the world of the characters and the strange dynamic of the world. The perspective alternates between Julia, a human living in the Blue, and Cameron. Personally, I preferred Julia’s chapters, just because we had a bit more of a chance to take in some of the events with more insight. Although, Cameron’s chapters also allowed us to learn some of the important backstory we might otherwise have not learned. The romances in the book are cute and entertaining, and I enjoyed reading through it.

Ultimately, it was a pretty enjoyable read. I wasn’t so certain about the vampire element of it to start with. To me, vampires mostly remind me of Twilight, but this was pleasantly surprising. I will say that it wasn’t perfect though. The worldbuilding is quite lacklustre, and created a lot of problems for me. I feel as though the author wanted to do a lot more with it, but there are certain things which aren’t explained enough. In particular, I couldn’t quite figure out what was happening with the red and blue areas, and it took me until about a third of the way through to realize it was meant to be set in the future, which probably isn’t the best sign.

Character-wise too, it lacked a little something. The main characters were well developed and realistic, but a lot of the secondary characters melted away for me a bit. Which again presented something of a problem, particularly in the latter half of the book. There were lots of twists and turns and betrayals, which would have been thrilling, if I knew who the backstabbers were and how they related to the main characters. That might not be a problem with the writing so much as with me, but I still struggled with this problem.

Overall, I’m giving The Gilded King a 6.5/10 stars. I liked the supernatural elements and the main characters and romance, but I struggled a bit with some of the side characters and the worldbuilding wasn’t there for me. That being said, I am keen to read the next book in the trilogy and see where the series develops from there.

Has anyone else read this book or plans to? What did you all think of it? I love reading your thoughts and opinions on the books that I read, so if you feel like sharing please leave comments in the comment section below.

Until next time,