GILDED CAGE

• YA Series: Dark Gifts (Book 1)
• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (February 14, 2017)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425284158
• ISBN-13: 978-0425284155
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STORY SUMMARY:

For readers of Victoria Aveyard and Kiera Cass comes a darkly fantastical debut set in a modern England where magically gifted aristocrats rule—and commoners are doomed to serve.

NOT ALL ARE FREE.

NOT ALL ARE EQUAL.

NOT ALL WILL BE SAVED.

Our world belongs to the Equals—aristocrats with magical gifts—and all commoners must serve them for ten years.

But behind the gates of England’s grandest estate lies a power that could break the world.

A girl thirsts for love and knowledge.

Abi is a servant to England’s most powerful family, but her spirit is free. So when she falls for one of their noble-born sons, Abi faces a terrible choice. Uncovering the family’s secrets might win her liberty—but will her heart pay the price?

A boy dreams of revolution.

Abi’s brother, Luke, is enslaved in a brutal factory town. Far from his family and cruelly oppressed, he makes friends whose ideals could cost him everything. Now Luke has discovered there may be a power even greater than magic: revolution.

And an aristocrat will remake the world with his dark gifts.

He is a shadow in the glittering world of the Equals, with mysterious powers no one else understands. But will he liberate—or destroy?

REVIEW:

A much-feted Wattpad success story, Vic James' page-turner gives us an alternative British class system based on those who have magical ability (the Skilled) and those who have none, who must spend ten years of their otherwise mundane lives slaving for the ruling class. 

The Hadley family decide to get their ten years over and done with together, but their plans are upset when the oldest son, Luke, is sent to the infamous slave town of Millmoor instead of the grandest house in Britain, belonging to the Jardine family.

With this physical split of the family, the narrative splits into two storylines that come back together when Luke rejoins his family at the Jardine's ancestral home for the last third of the book to find them caught up in the Jardine's political and familial power struggles. 

Luke, Abi, and Daisy Hadley are each in their own way bewitched by a member of the ruling class and as the first book in a projected trilogy ends on a cliffhanger it remains to be seen how those relationships will play out. In the meantime, in this first volume the world-building is intriguing and well-thought out, the details rich and visual, and the intrigue and brisk plotting pull you through the pages, gasping at the collateral damage of tertiary characters in this confident debut.