The Gilded King

The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey is the first in a series about vampires and the future of mankind, many years after civilization, as we know it, has ceased to exist. As part of The WriteReads‘ blog tour for this book, it’s my stop today and I will start off my saying: I love the cover of this book! How many times are you tempted to be part of a tour because the cover makes you dreamy? This is one of those books for me. 🙂

Let’s take a quick look at the synopsis before we dive in.

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.

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The Short Take – From Goodreads

If I had read this book about a decade ago during my vampire phase, I would have devoured every single book, including the ones in the prequel series. However, I’m not in my vampire phase anymore, and if the synopsis had mentioned vampires, I would probably not be here at all. 

Considering this is only the first book of the Sovereign series, it is not surprising that the role Julia, Cam, Lucas and Claudia will play in the grand scheme of things is on its way to being developed. World setting is a hard task and one of the biggest challenges that writers face, especially when working with mythical creatures, is that they want to bring their own original ideas to the table, while not differentiating them too much from what the readers already know about the creatures. Vampires are the perfect example in this case – as much as I remember being immersed in the vampire genre, there always seems to be new words to describe these creatures (and related creatures). Moroi, Strogio, Vampire… anything I have missed?

The Gilded King is based on an interesting premise – one that has been written in detail about by Josie in her series, Solis Invicti. As much as The Gilded King is the first of this new series, the groundwork for it has been in previous works and the first half can definitely be confusing and hard to get into. But that aside, there are some valuable lessons in this book and it made me think about how my approach to vampires has changed in the last decade.

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The Long Take – Themes for Thought

Whenever I start a book, I build some expectations based on the synopsis. As much as the cover of this book was beautiful, like many of my peers in this blog tour, I was confused by the initial chapters. That aside, here are the three main line of thoughts that came out of this read for me:

On Expectations

Let’s take a moment to discuss this:

Do we read with an assumption that the protagonists will be strong, deep and well-rounded characters?

You are probably thinking: no – we just want the main characters of the stories that we read to be relatable. They can absolutely exhibit human qualities! 

But do we have higher expectations of vampires just because they have lived so many years, over a thousand years for Cam, in this book? 

Time brings wisdom in the ideal world but life doesn’t always work that way. Our sorrow over things that happened, or our losses, can cloud our judgement and stop us from growing. Cam is the same way: He has a mission he has been pursuing for years now and that’s is all he has. He is so fixated on it, that nothing else seems to matter. He is willing to travel alone, to far off places, dangerous places, to find his friend.

Another aspect of this could be arrogance. His mistakes do not affect him as much as they would if he was human. He can heal fast enough. He can outrun anyone he wants. What’s there to loose with a little misstep? If you were a vampire, how would you feel about this?

I think with any character no matter what they are, it is important to acknowledge to read them as they are, rather than enforcing our expectations or presumptions on them. I struggled a bit with Cam that way, but he is a good example of characters with human traits.

Even if he is a vampire, he will always have the mental flaws of a human – who he used to be.

And I do appreciate that, as much as I once used to swoon over Edward being unable to forget anything in Twilight.

On Friendship

Cam has been looking for Emily for years now. There seems to be some guilt associated with this search but I’m still a bit unclear on the relationship the two had. This is probably explained well in the other series. I would say though that Cam’s laser focus attempt to find her are commendable. As someone who does not grow old the same way as humans, he has so much time and energy (and supplementary sources of energy, might I say ;)) that he can afford to go looking for her.

Lucas’ storyline gives us a little more background on how Emily fits with the rest of the story, and also, why the book is called The Gilded King. I appreciate that background, and the way histories have now become stories to later generations.

On Hierarchy

Julia is a server in Blue, one of the many people who might never advance above their status quo. I think it interesting that so many fantasy novels go back to the hierarchical structure of governance. There has to be a king or a ruler of some sort. Another vampire series that I remember reading which included similar ruling structures were the Vampire Academy by Rachelle Mead.

Julia is driven to get out, but she just hasn’t found the courage yet to take the leap to break the chains around her. I hope that future books will address this and make her character more resilient.

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I am thankful to The WriteReads and the author, for providing me a complimentary copy of the book as part of the blog tour, in exchange for an honest review. Be sure to check out the blog on the 10th for a Q&A with Josie Jaffrey!

Josie Jaffrey, author of The Gilded King

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more book thoughts on Armed with A Book!

Cover image: Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash