Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2017
368 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
For readers of Victoria Aveyard and Kiera Cass comes a darkly fantastical debut set in a modern England where magically gifted aristocrats rule - and commoners are doomed to serve.
NOT ALL ARE FREE.
NOT ALL ARE EQUAL.
NOT ALL WILL BE SAVED.
Our world belongs to the Equals - aristocrats with magical gifts - and all commoners must serve them for ten years.
But behind the gates of England's grandest estate lies a power that could break the world.
A girl thirsts for love and knowledge.
Abi is a servant to England's most powerful family, but her spirit is free. So when she falls for one of their noble-born sons, Abi faces a terrible choice. Uncovering the family's secrets might win her liberty - but will her heart pay the price?
A boy dreams of revolution.
Abi's brother, Luke, is enslaved in a brutal factory town. Far from his family and cruelly oppressed, he makes friends whose ideals could cost him everything. Now Luke has discovered there may be a power even greater than magic: revolution.
And an aristocrat will remake the world with his dark gifts.
He is a shadow in the glittering world of the Equals, with mysterious powers no one else understands. But will he liberate - or destroy?
"Starred Review. Brisk plotting, sympathetic characters, and plenty of intrigue will keep readers on the edges of their seats, eager for the next book in a very promising series." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. With solid YA crossover potential, this first novel should especially appeal to fans of Suzanne Collins's "The Hunger Games" trilogy." - Library Journal
"The twists and turns make this book hard to set down; a second read may reveal many details that readers might breeze past the first time through. Readers will eagerly await the rest of the trilogy started here." - Booklist
"Gilded Cage is a heart-pounding combination of dark magic, political revolution, and forbidden romance that had me addicted from the first page!" - Danielle L. Jensen, USA Today bestselling author of The Malediction Trilogy
"A dark and intriguing vision of an alternate, magic-drenched Britain, Gilded Cage kept me up long into the night." - Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings
This information about Gilded Cage was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vic James is a current-affairs TV director who loves stories in all their forms. Her programs for BBC1 have covered the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Britain's EU referendum. She has twice judged The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. Gilded Cage is her first novel, and an early draft of it won a major online award from Wattpad for most-talked-about-fantasy. She has lived in Rome and Tokyo, and currently lives in London.
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