The Gilded Wolves

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The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi was recommended to me on Twitter when I said "Six of Crows sux" and I'm absolutely floored that I had never heard of this book before. It was amazing. Everything SoC failed to deliver and more!

This is a heist book following a group of thieves in an alternate universe 1889 France where magic in the form of Forging rules the world. Forging is kind of like magic but they don't call it that, giving it its own separate name because they believe it is a gift God has bestowed on some people. There's a bit of theological stuff thrown into this book specifically hinging on the Tower of Babel story, but pretty loosely imo. Anyway there's two kinds of Forging: Mind affinity and Matter affinity. People who have the ability can manipulate objects based on the type of affinity they have and it creates some cool features in the world like living architecture and horrendous weapons. The main objective for the thieves in this book is to obtain a special forged artifact so that their leader can regain the inheritance that had been denied to him by a powerful Order that pretty much seems to run the world.

The main cast is initially made up of five characters: Séverin, Laila, Enrique, Zofia, and Tristan. They each get chapters with their own POV. I've learned from previous large POV casts that I hate this. I still didn't like it in this book, but it wasn't annoying enough for me to abandon it. Each character's POV is actually interesting and contributes to the story as well as their characterization. Each character is fantastic in their own right too. Most of them have real issues and not fantastical ones and it hits home hard sometimes. This paragraph gutted me:

Of course, it must be easy to spy when you hardly look like one of us. Marcelo spoke with no malice. In a way, that was worse. At birth, Enrique had favored his father, a full-blooded Spaniard. In the Philippines, many considered this a good trait. They called him mestizo. His aunts and uncles even joked that his dark-skinned mother must not have been in the room when he was conceived. Perhaps this was why the Ilustrados did not let him into their inner circle. It wasn’t his intellect that made him unwanted. It was his face.

Being a light skinned mixed kid myself this fucking smacked me. That shit hurted. And the author doesn't stop there. She goes into discrimination of different kinds of backgrounds in this book and the nastiness of colonialism. She did a fantastic job with this.

Everything that makes a book good was in here. Writing, pacing, world-building: all on point. The only thing I didn't like was that there was a lot of environment description I didn't care for after a while. It does its job setting the world, but I was more into the plot and the characters than the Forging stuff. Especially nearing the end of the book, I didn't care how the wall looked I was more interested in the strife. AND BOY THAT ENDING (Before the epilogue-y stuff meant to set up the next book) I WAS NOT EXPECTING THAT.

My favorite thing about this book is that the reader can clue things together along with the characters and there were a few times where I guessed the answers before I read them and I loved it. It's like when a mystery book comes with a map that's actually useful to the story.

I highly recommend this book. The author clearly put so much into it and it shines. It's a parade of OOHs and AHHs and OH NOs and YESs. There's so so much greatness in this book I hope everyone can enjoy it.

Comments

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That's exactly what I thought too! It had to be for marketing reasons there's no other explanation. The YA "Genre" *shakes fist*

That's true, it does make it worth it. And it's much better than pining for something similar to a good book and only finding duds 😔