Gild (The Plated Prisoner Series Book 1)

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For reasons i wont bother sharing, Auren gets to leave the palace and what follows is a pointlessly drawn out journey of her making stupid decisions, getting her acquaintances killed and raped and revealing powers that i couldnt work out why she hadnt used up til now to protect herself or her companions. Sure the grammar is a little to new age at times and she’s got to learn a new catch phrase that isn’t “bright side” but the subtle cues of a deeper story of her past and the hints of the manipulator she somehow loves? Like, I get that it is symbolic of the evil that sweeps the land and yadda yadda, but I find its trite and overused. Yes, the travel felt a little bit slow at times, but we got to know how Auren's real personality would be if she had a normal life outside her gilded cage.

Because my wings may have been clipped, but I am not in a cage, and I'm finally free to fly from the frozen kingdoms I've been kept in.

Perfectly shows how many subtleties an abusive relationship has through the rose-colored lens of the victim. Gives a lot of useful details and knowledge about the kingdoms and the characters without infodumping, it rather feels like a captivating dark fairytale being told by a magnificent storyteller. Even though nothing extraordinary happened for the first half of the book, I just couldn’t stop reading. For starters, I'll say I first rated this book 4 stars, but after I started elaborating the review, I absolutely believed this was a 5 star read despite some little flaws.

Known to all as Midas's favored, Auren is golden-touched—she literally is covered in gold (except she's not actually made of gold of course). Raven Kennedy is a bestselling American author of fantasy and romance, best known for her TikTok fantasy sensation, the Plated Prisoner series. Anyway, throw in some random pirate, drop in a long thought dead Fae race, elude to the fact that she is something that its clear she is already by this point and youve got yourself a train wreck of a book that i literally rolled my eyes at at every swipe of the kindle page. The writing was good and it actually felt like a fantasy book, even though the dialogue was modern- ish, and the story was just compulsively readable for me to want to find out what happened.We get some little info about the magical abilities of the inhabitants of Orea, but it is still intriguing enough for me to desperately want to know more about it in the next book, since we're given hints that many things will be explained later.

In my opinion, it gives it more realistic depth and macabre charm, but I would advise it against audiences who are sensitive or impressionable to the contents in this book. She is unhappy in her golden cage but she is happy anytime he pays attention to her, when he leaves the women he has sex in front of her and caresses her hair through the cage she is happy and convinced she means everything to him. Still, we can see how her trust in him slowly cracks and how her blinded love and devotion start to erode as she realizes how badly Midas can treat her when it suits him. He turned her gold - for reasons unknown - and keeps her caged up in his golden palace to apparently just watch him indulge himself in carnal exploits.

At the age of 15, Auren was a homeless girl and a victim of child trafficking until Midas saved her. For what purpose I have no idea because they do nothing when it matters other than elude to the fact that she's clearly something 'special'.

Everything he does has an alterior motive and as the book progressed I started to really dislike him. Raven Kennedy is a California girl born and raised, whose love for books pushed her into creating her own worlds.

You know, this probably would’ve been even better if I didn’t accidentally read 76% of the second book thinking it was the first book… but damn, coming back to the actual first book was a good idea. This book details the empowerment she feels as she is finally released albeit temporarily from the gold cage. I don't want to say too much more, but let's just leave it as sometimes help comes from the unlikeliest of places, and also if you like Rhysand from ACOTAR but thought to yourself, "You know what would be even hotter? She's been kept in a cage for years and no one is allowed to touch her except King Midas and he doesn't touch her that often. I swear to God this one went so well and I had so much fun and was so excited to read this book together with her.