The Gilded Wolves

!!!Spoiler Warning!!! If you haven’t read this book yet, I give away some key spoilers!

The Gilded Wolves

by Roshani Chokshi

I think the greatest power is belief, for what is a god without it?

I was really disappointed with this book.
It’s not exactly terrible, but if you’ve ever read Crooked Kingdom it’s like a watered-down version of that. Even the characters seem overly familiar.
I was hoping for something a little more unique.

There were so many wants inside him that he doubted there was room for blood in his body.

The book is set in an alternate version of Paris in 1889. In this Paris there is a type of magic called Forging. Basically, in what amounts to a crazy amount of religious overtones, God broke down the tower of Babel and some pieces of it were entrusted to certain factions of people. Some people have the power to forge items, which basically means they can make magical stuff.
I really didn’t like the magic system much. It seems like there’s no rules to what can and can’t be made. Whenever the characters were in dire straights, it just so happened that one of them had an item that could make everything better, even though it had literally never been mentioned before. It was all just too convenient.

Take what the world owes you by any means necessary. The world has a shit memory. It will never pay its debts unless you force its hand.

The characters are cool, but they just seem so similar to characters I’ve already read about before. There’s some backstory that makes them interesting and unique, but honestly I didn’t really start to care about any of them.
I really liked the representation in this book, though. Hypnos was possibly one of my favourite characters.
I did think that Zofia and Tristan’s characters were too similar to each other, but aside from that they were all interesting enough to hold my attention.

If he let her, she could lay waste to his heart.

The one thing I was super impressed with was the amount of research that went into this book. The puzzles, gods, items and histories were all thoroughly detailed and a delight to read about. Especially the bit about Napoleon’s honey bees. I can’t fault any of the research, clearly a great deal of thought and time has gone into this book.
I also liked that the puzzles weren’t your run-of-the-mill easy. There were some seriously devious puzzles included in this book, relying on math and symbology in equal parts to solve. Unfortunately, I found that a lot of the explanations of everything could be drawn out and a bit on the boring side. I honestly struggled to keep reading at several points.

She thought that, perhaps, for a kiss like this, even hell would put forth stars.

In the end, it was a decent book, but not entirely overwhelming. I don’t think I’ll be reading the sequel, but I can totally understand that some people are going to love this book. I’m kind of sad I didn’t.

Villain Rating

The man in the mustard coloured suit, Roux-Joubert, is the villain. He’s a member of the Fallen House, and comes complete with a henchman to do his bidding. He’s completely focused on reviving the fragments, or some such, and he steals, plots and tortures to get what he wants.

Sure, it turns out that he’s working for a bigger evil, but for our characters, he’s the main problem they have to deal with. He goes from being suave and clever to a sniveling wreck far too quickly for my liking, though. Then there’s the thing with him bleeding gold. I don’t get it. He’s supposed to be divinely blessed or something, right? So his blood is gold, but when he coughs up blood onto his handkerchief it’s still red. What gives? 5/10

Happy Reading,

Claire