Gilded Cage by Vic James (ARC Review)

Gilded Cage by Vic James

Release date: February 14, 2017

*I was provided an ARC thanks to a lovely Goodreads contest, but it in no way changes my view!*

I feel guilty. Guys and gals, I really do.

Because I didn’t like this book. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it let enough get past three chapters. And there are soooooo many people that are so excited for this in the blogging community, and I feel so guilty for not liking this. D:

Anyway, let’s start off with the basics (with a little help from my friend, Goodreads):

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 the 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?

I really don’t know where the disconnect happened for me with this book. It had a fantastic premise, an interesting bunch of characters, and the writing was decent enough. This is one of those books that definitely makes you use your mind to keep with all the twists and turns, and it has a fantastically bad villain as a main character. Yay, right? Maybe?

I’m sad to see you, Snow…you don’t look very sad at all.

Anyway, all of these elements really should have worked. However, they just fell flat for me. I started this book on Christmas, and I finally gave up on it on January 17th. That’s a lot of days where I tried to pick it up but had to give up after a few pages or I would stare at it, knowing I need to pick it up and finish it and…just couldn’t. Nor did I want to. At all.

I think perhaps where the drawbacks came was not just because of its general boringness to me was the multiple POVs. There were too many early on with not enough connection to them, and it just made me use my brain too much. There were a lot of concepts, a lot of changes to the everyday world, and just…I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and that is perhaps where the majority of my disconnect came from.

So, I feel guilty. I really wanted to like this book. I wanted to love it and fangirl over it and cry over it. I just can’t. It’s kind of sad when the most exciting thing about the whole ordeal is the cool spinning there they sent you with the ARC where you hold two springs on the side of the circle piece, and while spinning it, you saw a bird in and out of the cage.

Sorry?

No rating since I didn’t get too far into it (about 15%), and a Snow White rating!

Check it out:

• Goodreads
• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble

What do you think? Have you read Gilded Cage? Do you want to? Do you ever feel book guilt over hating a book or not finishing one that you know a lot of people want to read?