Alexis Hall's Reviews > Gilded

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

I need to stop reading YA books that turn out to be the first in a series because, holy God, does this end on … well. To call it a cliff-hanger seems to under-represent both the scope of the figurative incline and the intensity of my hanging from it.

Anyway, it’s an amazing read, though also—and I need to stop remarking on how startling I find YA’s commitment to Going There—dark AF. Kids literally die in this book. In horrible ways. In fact, a tonne of horrible things happen in general. Although I suppose I can take some comfort that the romantic lead is not, for once, a mass murderer. Yay? In any case, while Gilded may take its inspiration from Rumpelstiltskin, it’s a far richer and complex endeavour than the original tale, effortlessly blending German folklore with its own world-building to explore, y’know, the very nature of stories themselves.

The heroine, Serilda, is a miller’s daughter cursed or blessed by the trickster god of stories. Compelled to lie—or from another perspective to tell stories—her gifts, along with her peculiar eyes, ensure the adults in her village view her with suspicion (although the children are drawn to her taletelling). One night, she encounters two fairy creatures on the run from the terrifying Erlking, master of the wild hunt, and lies to protect them, claiming she can spin straw into gold. Unfortunately, this causes the Erlking to take an interest in her and she finds herself locked in dungeon, tasked with spinning straw into gold or forfeit her life. In this impossible task, she is aided by a mysterious “poltergeist” who haunts the castle the Erlking occupies—the nature of both the poltergeist and the castle being their own mystery that Serilda gradually begins to unravel.

And um. This is all completely terrifying: everyone in this story is just so damn vulnerable. Quick-thinking and story-ready though she is, Serilda is ultimately just an innkeeper’s daughter. Gild, the poltergeist, is desperately lonely, sweetly courageous and has no memory of who or what he is, or why. The people Serilda cares about are farmers, innkeepers, librarians and peasants. Even the witch is mainly a herbalist. The gods (non-binary gods, by the way, which I appreciated) are abstract in their motives and mostly absent. When Serilda does encounter magical beings, even if their needs align with hers, its clear they have their own agendas and concerns, far removed from those humans. And don’t get me started on the Erlking. He’s callous, powerful and unabashedly cruel, yet his malignancy is not without motive and cohesion. Driven by lost love as he is, his relationship with his own villainy is far from uncomplicated.

In fact, if the book had a weakness for me, it’s that the sections in the Erlking’s castle are so pulse-poundingly tense and cast such a strong sense of foreboding over the rest of the book that I had a hard time getting invested in the world beyond the castle (despite the fact it’s quite well developed). Mainly everyone just felt too doomed to care about—which, err, was broadly correct. I also suspect some readers won’t like the modernistic tone to a lot of the dialogue but, personally, I appreciated it. There’s kind of a “fairy tale” voice that can be a bit portentous when over-used and so there’s something pacey and engaging about the way Serilda and Gild especially interact with each other. It made them feel like real people living in a real place, albeit one of full of magic, mystery, and imminent disaster, and their relationship came across as genuinely sweet to me.

I should also add that I loved Serilda and Gild as characters. He’s an intriguing twist on Rumpelstiltskin, maintaining the mischief, but losing the slyness—and he’s both heroic and vulnerable in ways that usually aren’t allowed to align. As for Serilda, she’s a deeply flawed protagonist, strong but overmatched, and that kind of made her very relatable to me. I always feel like a bit of a mug when stories about stories about storytellers but … eh. Trite or not, as readers and writers we are drawn to that shit for a reason.

Ultimately this ended up being a much darker read than I thought it was going to be. But I quickly fell in love with it—though I do need the sequel urgent to alleviate some of this dreadful trauma, please.