Before the male elders can find her true death, a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. When her blood turns out to run gold, she is deemed impure, a demon, and must face the Death Mandate all her kind go through. In the country of Otera, women must wear masks and defer to the men in their lives at all times, and all Deka wants is to be accepted enough to be considered marriageable. Sixteen-year-old Deka waits anxiously for the Ritual of Purity-for her blood to run red, so she can be accepted as a pure woman by her village at last. Finally reading it, however, has been a bizarre, disturbing, and deeply unenjoyable experience. The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna was easily one of my most anticipated books since it was supposed to be released in 2020, its publication date pushed back due to the pandemic. Well, what happened here? I’m flabbergasted. Thank you, to NetGalley and the publisher, for offering this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Recommended Readers: Older teens, but also no one unless you’re really in the mood for some grimdark Notable Notables: Female-led, POC cast original, if underdeveloped, world-building How, then, did the following books fail to live up to my expectations? Time to find out. While an original story can be groundbreaking, any story that is well-told will travel farther regardless if we have seen its like before or not. Are books getting worse? Or are my expectations as a reader becoming unwieldy and unrealistic? In an era where stories are becoming bigger and bigger franchises with over-the-top visuals, rehashed plots, and plot-disarming twists, can we be surprised by anything anymore? Have we seen it all? Many of these books also debuted in 2021, and that in and of itself is a depressing thought.
It wasn’t that these books merely fell short of the mark they were depressingly bad in ways that made me feel like the hype I had for them was silly and wasteful. With the marketing hype machines that are publishing houses and authors’ Twitter accounts, you never can tell which books will become soured by disappointment upon finally experiencing them, no matter how excited or hopeful you were for them. Once I’d reviewed my year of reading and discovered the books that most surprised me in 2021, I knew I had to talk about the books that most disappointed me next.
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