Blog Tour: The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey

Thank you so much to Dave for organizing this Blog Tour. Check out the twitter account for all the other stops! (Out handles are in the featured image)

Title: The Gilded King
Author: Josie Jaffrey

Series: Sovereign (Book 1)
Published: June 25th, 2018
Selfpublished

Length: 303 pages
Format: Ebook

 

Buy here

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In the Blue, the world’s last city, all is not well.

Julia is stuck within its walls. She serves the nobility from a distance until she meets Lucas, a boy who believes in fairytales that Julia’s world can’t accommodate. The Blue is her prison, not her castle, and she’d escape into the trees if she didn’t know that contamination and death awaited humanity outside.

But not everyone in the Blue is human, and not everyone can be contained.

Beyond the city’s boundaries, in the wild forests of the Red, Cameron has precious little humanity left to lose. As he searches for a lost queen, he finds an enemy rising that he thought long dead. An enemy that the humans have forgotten how to fight.

One way or another, the walls of the Blue are coming down. The only question is what side you’ll be on when they do.

*Synopsis taken from Goodreads

The Gilded King is the first book in Josie’s new series (trilogy?) and I am very glad I managed to snap a place on this blog tour. It’s a very unique take on Vampires and something more I’m not gonna reveal ^^ (Read the book)

It’s told in alternating chapters between the POV of Julia, a human, and Cameron, a Silver, a Soli Invicti. The two have very distinct voices and experience the story completely differently.

Julia lives in the Blue, although she dreams to one day maybe enter the Red and be free. She just has to find out what the price would be. Her life?
Then she is thrown deeper into the world she wishes to escape and meets Lucas, a young Nobel who may be able to give her back her hope. Make her believe that fairytales may just be possible.

I really enjoyed her chapters. She stumbles through this world where she has no power and tries to survive and be herself. She is stubborn and a little bitter. She does suffer a little from the I’m not like other girls syndrome though. It’s not that back luckily. And she is kinda aware that she’s doing it, which is great.
Lucas has his own secrets but his outlook on life infects her slowly more and more.

Cam, on the other hand, is barely in the Blue anymore. He is tirelessly searching for his long lost friend Emmy, even though everyone else has given up on her.
His chapters are basically all travel. He meets strange things and gets an unexpected travel companion.
Cam can sometimes be a little … well, clueless, but that’s okay.

I really liked his chapters in the beginning, after a while I was a little bit bored though. I felt like not enough happened and I was way more interested in Julia’s chapters. But fortunately, that changed towards the end. The pace definitely picked up and lots of really interesting things went down. Including that very mean cliffhanger … I’m looking at you, Josie! That was evil! I love it!

The two romances were well written. Both very slow burn which I love. I also quite appreciated the way Cameron, who searched the Red for centuries alone, was a little uncomfortable with touch, something that changed throughout that time.

I feel like I shouldn’t say much more because I think it’s best to experience some of the revelations with the characters together.
There were some secondary characters that I’m hoping we will learn more about and more about their motivations in the sequels.

Just one last thing. I loved the world. The mixture of post-apocalyptic/dystopian/fantasy was very intriguing and I’m looking forward to knowing more about it.
Just a fair warning: If you don’t enjoy worlds in which you are just thrown into and you have to figure everything out slowly then you should probably read the prequel series (Solis Invicti) first, so you are already more familiar with the world and its rules.
If you go into this knowing nothing like I did, you sometimes just have to accept that things work like that for some time. I really didn’t mind that though.

The Author:

I have always written stories, but it wasn’t until I started the first book in the Solis Invicti series in 2014 that I really became obsessed with writing. I love to read, particularly where the escapism of the story is enhanced with an element of fantasy or science fiction. For me, writing is simply an extension of that journey, but I get to decide what happens next (though it’s amazing how often the characters seem to decide for themselves what I’m going to write!).

I love to hear from readers, so please do get in touch through my website or via Twitter.

Thank you for reading!

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*PSSSSSST The Gilded King is FREE right now on Kindle! Links here:

Amazon US and Amazon UK