Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2020

Category: Fantasy

Summary: Gold.

Gold floors, gold walls, gold furniture, gold clothes. In Highbell, in the castle built into the frozen mountains, everything is made of gold.

Even me.

King Midas rescued me. Dug me out of the slums and placed me on a pedestal. I’m called his precious. His favored. I’m the woman he Gold-Touched to show everyone that I belong to him. To show how powerful he is. He gave me protection, and I gave him my heart. And even though I don’t leave the confines of the palace, I’m safe.

Until war comes to the kingdom and a deal is struck.

Suddenly, my trust is broken. My love is challenged. And I realize that everything I thought I knew about Midas might be wrong.

Because these bars I’m kept in, no matter how gilded, are still just a cage. But the monsters on the other side might make me wish I’d never left.

My thoughts: Let’s chalk this up to two things: my morbid curiosity about so-called “BookTok books” and the fact that someone suggested this for my reading project. I went into it with an open mind, and that open mind is now scarred and closed.

To start, I understand that there is an audience for books that write about sexual violence in a salacious way, dangling it as a sexy sort of threat that serves no purpose beyond cheap thrills and showing how special and desirable the female main character is; including graphic details for no purpose beyond shock value. I am not and never will be the audience for these books, but I understand that some people like them. (I also know that there are people who cry “Exploitative titillation!! Boo!!” about literally any book featuring sexual violence, and I hope it’s clear that I’m not one of those people. I read and love a totally normal number of books about rape. It’s not something to be concerned about at all. LOOK AT THIS BLOG!!!!!). I’m not here to tell anyone what they can/can’t read or write, but I will say that I don’t really think it works well to do the things I just mentioned and then turn around and try to market your book as a bold story about self-actualization and trauma recovery at the same time. Except I guess you can do that and then have tens if not hundreds of thousands of people buy and love your book, because here we have Gild!!

Another thing that I understand perfectly well is that a book that feels cheap and gross to one person may have deep meaning for another. All I can do is explain why this book feels cheap and gross to me. In Gild, there are exponentially more instances of graphic scenes of sexual content, including an extremely detailed and violent rape scene, and interchangeable disgusting men threatening women and/or leeringly talking about the nasty, nasty things they’re going to do (how is it possible that multiple men use the exact same threat of filling Auren’s “golden cunt” with cum until it’s leaking out of her? Can we have a little variety in our disgusting rape threats, please?) than there are instances of the book even attempting to to say anything about the dynamics of rape culture or the psychological impact of trauma or anything else of that nature.

When Kennedy does attempt anything like that, it’s a bit of a mess. Auren is supposed to be a broken girl who has been groomed by a skilled manipulator, someone who has chosen the safety of imprisonment over the dangers of the real world. As it is, she veers rapidly and inconsistently between not being able to assess for danger in a desperate slum like the one she survived in for years to pining after Midas to making feminist statements about sex work to denouncing how wrong it is that men abuse and exploit women’s bodies by paying them for sex. She is established as something of an alcoholic in the beginning of the book and then it’s never mentioned again, certainly not to the extent of withdrawal becoming a problem for her when she is unable to drink while traveling and kidnapped by pirates. At one point she blames herself for the group’s capture by pirates in her internal monologue, but when another woman blames her for it pages later, she responds by saying “It’s not my fault! Why would it be my fault!?” In sum: very little is done to approach the Dark Topics the book throws around, and less of that is done well. Poor Gild! It doesn’t help that I read My Dark Vanessa right before it, which made its attempts at writing a damaged grooming victim seem all the more deeply unsucessful in contrast.

There is no true cohesive plot – it’s just murder and rape threats and people being awful to Auren strung together with traveling sequences in between – which would be fine if the book had any other strength to stand on. But no character has any notable development beyond Auren (whose development I just described) and the prose is awkward, fails in its attempts at lyricism, and stands in stark contrast to the dialogue, which is extremely modern and casual. The world-building is scant and poorly conveyed when it is present – for instance, instead of incorporating the history of fae into the story in a natural way, there is just a random infodump chapter explaining their past in third-person while the rest of the book is in first-person from Auren’s point of view.

Bright side? Auren has prehensile ribbons sprouting out of her spine, which is really weird and fun. I like the sliver of nuance in how Rissa and the other saddles try to cling to their professionalism and skills of entertaining and flattery when kidnapped. And my reading experience was surreal in how quickly the pages flew by while I was caught in a kind of sick, entranced daze. YES I’m going to keep reading!!!!!!! Everyone I’ve talked to is like “the first book is bad but then it gets sooooooo good.” I will find out if it does, indeed, get sooooooo good, and I will report back.