Week 4
Another week in 2021, another list of wild headlines.
I think I’m glad I don’t know anything about the stock market, really.
#6: THE GILDED WOLVES by Roshani Chokshi
Oh boy I really wanted to like this one.
An early red flag should probably have been all of the reviews that compared it to Six of Crows, a book I admittedly found to be overhyped and kind of boring.
A heist novel set in a magical, steampunk-y alternate history Paris sounds awesome. And for the first, mm, 50 pages maybe? I was having a decent time. I’m not entirely sure when it all started to fall apart for me, but hoo boy.
The smallest of the problems is that the story is kind of confusing. I wasn’t sure if it was just me, but consulting other reviews, no, this seems to be a consistent issue people have. The worldbuilding is complicated and draws, in my opinion, from too many places. Math AND history?? Absurd.
It didn’t help that as the novel went on, I became less and less invested in TRYING to understand what was going on. Also, the story ends like thirty pages before the book does and the fact that it keeps going from that point gets weirder and weirder.
A confusing plot could have been forgivable, of course, if I had liked the characters at all, and therein lies the bigger problem. In particular, Séverin, our ostensible main character, is a total heel and a bore, I cannot stand him. Many of the others have moments where they’re fun, but they often feel extremely one dimensional and the banter between them feels strange and lifeless.
One of the characters felt so superfluous and I cared so little for their well-being that when they died dramatically near the end the main emotion I felt was amusement. Which, uh, was likely not the desired outcome.
The characters didn’t work for me, so neither did most of the relationships. There’s multiple will-they-won’t-they romances in this, only one of which I found at all bearable, but even then, felt under-developed. The author is also trying for a found family dynamic, which again, never quite came together for me, and felt actively thwarted at every turn.
There’s an interesting current of anti-colonial commentary running through the story, and it’s probably the thing I liked most. Obviously, the writer is a woman of colour, and she brings that into a semi-historical setting in a way that really transforms the approach. It’s different than other things I’ve read in a similar setting, and I dug it. I wish I’d liked the rest of the book more.