Gilded Cage by Vic JamesMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I managed to sleep on this one for quite a while after waiting for it to come out for a couple of years, mostly because my library couldn't be arsed to get it themselves and I wound up having to special order it from Sacramento. After seeing the sequel join it on the shelves at the bookstore, I decided to finally pick up Gilded Cage, but after all the Wattpad hype, unlike with Taran Matharu's Summoner series, I confess myself disappointed. This book tries to be a lot at once - a YA fantasy dystopian that's dark enough to wind up on the adult shelves, like The Bone Season but with actual teenage protags; an alternative history, again like The Bone Season; a sci-fi family drama dystopian in the vein of the TV series Colony, and sure enough, Luke's storyline in particular has eerie shades of that of Colony's Bram Bowman. That said, though, James tries so hard to give us so much at once that it turns the book into a muddled mess of jumbled multi-POVs and thin world-building. There's next to no information about what the ironically-named "Equals" are - wizards? Aliens? Mutants? Who knows. I'm sorry to say I'm probably not going to read the sequel - this book just had so much going for it that to disappoint me this much makes me lose just about all interest.
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