The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna Book Review

Rating: 2 out of 5 bastards Okay, so off rip this book aggravated me a little because on page 1 there's a badly drawn map. Listen. I am many things on here. A fake lawyer, a peach with an eyeball and luscious lips, and sometimes I even moonlight as an ecologist. I'm also, apparently, a cartographer. And one thing I, Peachy G. Harrison, cartographer extraordinaire, cannot stand, is a bad map, so I'm gonna have to deduct points from Gryffindor. Idk if a real mapmaker worked on this or not. The map is too small, the geography is strange and [Shrek 2 they don't even have dental voice] it doesn't even have a scale bar. How am I supposed to understand the size of this nation with no scale bar. This especially becomes a problem mere pages into the book because there appears to be heavy diversity: the people of the northern areas are straight up European- influenced and the people of the southern areas are straight up African- influenced. The eastern areas appear to be Asian- influenced. And the western areas. Well, apparently, they're [flips pages] motherly. So. (Content warning in summary for murder talk) Summary: The Gilded Ones is a 2021 book by Namina Forna about a girl named Deka who is about to undergo some sort of purity ritual to determine if she's marriageable material. The purity ritual happens at 16 years of age, because that’s standard. We're thrown into a sea of in- your- face exposition as she explains she's real nervous and she's considered ugly where she lives in the North part of this world because everybody around her are white people expys and she's a black person expy. They also have a religion that somehow is the main religion of...their whole world, barring some outlying places in the South. This religion involves a lot of modesty for and covering of women and also involves a lot of oppression of women. Women aren't allowed to work, show their face, or even jog at a leisurely pace. Of course, at the purity thing, Deka is revealed to be impure. Impurity in this world means you've got gold blood and can kinda control the dementors, I mean deathshrieks. The deathshrieks are some not very well described monsters. Sometimes, they sounded like ghosts, other times they sounded like werewolves, and other times they sounded like very large porcupines. I had a hard time pinning down what they looked like in my mind, but this one might be my error. So then, the elder priest dude, her very own father and her 1- page love interest kill her 9 times and she comes back each time like a cat. A lady shows up from the emperor's palace and lets her know that the emperor is rounding up all the impure women to make an army because not dying and being super strong basically makes you Captain America in this world. The idea is that they can defeat the deathshrieks forever and then they’ll be granted something to purify their blood. The rest of the book follows Deka's adventures as a super soldier. Along the way she kills some deathshrieks, loses some friends, becomes a feminist revolutionary without doing much work and falls in love with another boy she met 1 day before. Classic. Review: As I mentioned in the summary, once again (similar to my Legendborn review) we've got a book fuuuuuulllllll of exposition. Though with this book it's not the dialogue, it's the internal narration of the main character where we find it. All tell, no show. This will come up again. And again, and again. Listen. Show don't tell is a suggestion. Usually it is a good suggestion, but it is a suggestion nonetheless. Obviously, there are many situations in books where things need to be told to the reader because showing may not be enough. That is not the case in this book. From the first page, we are being told everything about this world, everything about the religion, everything about the beauty standards. Instead of being shown how these things have shaped the world, the people and our main character, we are being flatly told these things in narration. See below for two of the numerous examples I showed to the team at Bastard Reviews as I powered through this:

(Like, do you think the deathshrieks want to kill them? It was really unclear. Please repeat it once more for a grand total of saying the same thing 4 times in 4 sentences.)

The few times we are shown anything, it usually doesn't coincide with what we're told. She tells us she's soooooooo ugly practically from the first page, but then 10 pages later we're shown one of these white northerners supposedly crushing on her. And Deka's internal narration is quick to point out that he never did that before. It comes off strange. If we had been shown more, like maybe a past purity ceremony, or given more worldbuilding to help to set up the standards and how they change around the ceremony, perhaps her 1-page love interest's sudden amore would make sense. Another thing that comes off strange is that girls aren't allowed near sharp objects so they won't bleed and show their gold blood before the ceremony. Here's the issue. Okay, so our author has explained away that the girls don't have periods until after they're 16 years old. This is of course explained through flat narration. I'm not gonna say that it doesn't make sense, necessarily. This is a fantasy world with fantasy White people and fantasy Black people and fantasy Asian people and fantasy Motherly people. So, she can do whatever she wants here. However. This is a fantasy world based upon some real-life people and conventions, to a degree. There are real life expys of real-life people in this book. The emperor in this book is coming to mind, as he is at least named after a past real-life emperor of what is now Benin. And, according to the author, appears to be based on that real- life emperor to a degree.  But, it's still a fantasy, where monsters roam the land and people perform feats of magic. So, I wonder why she didn't just take it farther. She coulda just. Made these folks real hardy. Like stab 'em and they don't bleed hardy. Could have made the girls not have periods. Why do periods have to be a thing in a world where people bleed gold? In real life, if you bleed gold, it would be... I lack the words. Let me look to my compatriots. As fellow bastard reviewer Perihelion said, and I quote: "Man what kinda iron deficiency." So many ways the author could have taken the "never bleed until the ceremony" thing and she took the route of least resistance. But, as we've established, the author lacks imagination. And true vision. And good writing. And... Because, honestly, how does staying away from sharp objects keep you from bleeding? Children fall down. They scrape a knee. They get bitten by dogs. They get a splinter. They get a blister on their foot that pops after they walk across the world’s largest shopping center parking lot from Best Buy to Party City in flip flops. We have blood vessels in our eyes. People get random nosebleeds. (Which even happens in Chapter 2 to Deka's very own father.) How do you stop women, and only women, from bleeding for 16 years...like what is going ooooooooonnnnn. It just doesn't make sense that you can make it to 16 years old and not bleed. It doesn't. It cannot be explained away! Maybe if there was some worldbuilding about super thick skin or any level of some showing rather than telling some things I could let it go but there isn't. As such, this shit is ridiculous and takes you right out the book because of how little it makes sense. I'm calm. No, I'm not. Like, you can see blood under a human's skin! I can turn my hands over and see the red blood underneath the skin of my palms. There are white girl expys in this book with “cute pink cheeks” according to the narration. If they have pink cheeks, it stands to reason that their blood is... red. What else would be causing the pinkness of their cheeks? Is everybody in this society science deficient as well as iron deficient? This later gets ret-conned in the book by saying their blood changes once they come into their heritage. So, then, why are they not allowed to bleed before then? Then... their blood would be red like anybody else's. Whew, that blood rant was something. But I said all that to expound on what the big problem of this book is. I touched on it at the beginning of this review, but I wanna expound on it below. This book is all tell, no show. It, like Legendborn, became infuriating after a while. The main character, Deka, would repeat something someone just said in dialogue, almost verbatim, in her narration. Then she would proceed to explain what was JUST said. Something like this happened every page: "It's a cat," said Keita, gazing lovingly into my eyes despite the fact that we just met and have spoken twice. Wow. Keita was saying the creature was a cat. I could also see that the creature was a cat. Reading between the lines of what Keita wasn't saying, l could infer the creature was a cat. Its triangle ears gave away that it was a cat. But that's weird because I'd never seen a cat this far from my homelands before. But indeed, it was a cat.  "It is a cat," I tell Brita, because obviously if I don't tell Brita it's a cat, she won't know even though she was standing 3 feet away when Keita said: "It's a cat." Rinse and repeat 8 times per chapter. It is so frustrating to read books that are written like this because you never feel like you're Getting Anywhere. You're just walking in circles with this lost ass character and you're lost too. It also feels condescending as shit. Like, do you not trust that the readers can infer shit through context clues? Do you think that if you do not write out every plot point verbatim in dialogue or narration that readers won't get it? Do you think you are writing something so complex, that if you don't say what it is, us dummies will never know? Or is it that you read nothing but the same explaining- ass fiction and so you write the same watered down, full of exposition fiction too. And that's the ultimate problem with this book. When an author depends so much on telling rather than showing, they inevitably forget to tell you what you need to know or they tell you at time far too late into the story. Deka fights deathshrieks the majority of this story, but it isn't until page 358 out of 495 that she tells us the deathshrieks kill only the men but keep young girls. And that they. .. just can't find the girls anywhere. The girls' bodies aren't there, so they know the deathshrieks are kidnapping them. This is...extremely pertinent information to know.  Early on that could have even been told, yes told, to us from the first time the deathshrieks are mentioned. Or, it could have been built into the worldbuilding by showing that women do not run and scream from the deathshrieks because they know they aren’t the target. But, because the author forgot to tell us in the beginning, we don't learn until the end. Therefore, it ends up having the effect of extreme confusion where you're whipping your head around wondering what the fuck is going on. I knew the emperor would become the bad guy by virtue of genre, but nothing in the wordlbuilding hints that the emperor is a god-person too. Nothing hints, at all really, towards anything he reveals in his Scooby- doo villian monologue at the end. Nothing prepares us for Keita and Deka's grand love story because they barely interact and when they do, it's for two sentences and then he disappears for 4 chapters. Because we aren't told, we have nothing to work off of for things that are supposed to be huge chunks of the plot. My last complaint is outside the context of this book but also somewhat related to the grandiose sentiment threading through this book. You can tell when she wrote this, the author thought she wrote the world's greatest feminist treatise. That she was ushering in the 18th wave of feminism with this one. That nobody was seeing her in the feminist arena. Every page is filled with these very flat ideas of feminism but presented with this grand smugness as if she’s really dropping some super-hot knowledge. Alas, the knowledge is just kinda feminism. Shadows of feminism. Feminism La Croix. Like someone said feminism in the same room as this book and a little of it made it into the book. Deka goes from being afraid of her own shadow one page and the next page starts giving these incredibly on- the- nose feminist speeches to her comrades. The patriarchal elements in this book are so flatly stated and the feminism is incredibly two- dimensional. It all feeds into the constant tell and no show, because it never feels feminist. It feels like wooden characters saying words that should be powerful and rebellious and system- challenging but come off insincere and goofy. So, now on to the outside context. Recently Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court. I won't get too much into it. You know what it is. This author used the overturning as an opportunity to... market this book. See below tweets for the tweets for the tweeting for the twitter.

I understand she may have meant well and that she was overcome with a lot of emotion, as many people were by the overturning. I am not faulting her for her emotion. Nor am I faulting her for wanting to find some positivity and trying to help in a way she felt comfortable with. But this is not the time to market your book. Especially since this book doesn't even do or embody all the strong feminist things that you think it does. If this book was at least a well- written, feminist look at the patriarchy and the way religion interacts with misogyny, I'd have given her a little more slack here. But this book is a two- dimensional, not very good examination of those ideals. Therefore, using a very real stripping of rights as an opportunity to market your books, not once but twice? [Young Miami voice] ion like dat. It came off as extremely tone deaf. She already apologized for some other shortsighted things she said during the initial chaos, but somehow using the time to get a little promo slipped her mind in those apologies. Anyway. Outside context aside, I'll give the book a 2 out of 5 girls that bleed golden except one of them is more golden because she's The Chosen One. It wasn't very well written thematically but there were no glaring grammatical errors and at least I could read it without being utterly confused or lost. That's more than I can say for these other twitter authors with their bad and terrible writing. It had good bones and in the hands of someone more skilled, could have been a good examination of the way religion and the patriarchy intertwine. Overall, it is unremarkable and absolutely not the brilliant, feminist revolution that the author was envisioning writing. I don't believe she has the depth to tell the story that needed to be told here.