The Gilded Wolves: Book Review

The Gilded Wolves plot summary

Séverin Montagnet-Alarie was cheated out of his inheritance, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. Together with a rag-tag team of specialists, he’s sucked into a mission for the almost all-powerful Order of Babel. But the stakes are higher than anybody realises, and enemies all around. Séverin’s single-mindedness can’t mask the obvious: he has no idea what he’s got them all into.

Content warnings:

• Colonialism
• Racism
• Violence, descriptions of injury and death
• Reference to stillbirth
• Reference to suicide
• Grief

My thoughts on The Gilded Wolves

The Gilded Wolves, by Roshani Chokshi, is a YA fantasy novel. Set in an alternate-reality nineteenth century Paris, it follows a diverse group of characters through puzzles and mysteries. While it has some massive strengths, I have to confess… I didn’t love this book. Not nearly as much as I wanted to, anyway.

The Gilded Wolves’ characters are definitely a strength

I’ll start with something I did like a lot! I thought the cast of characters was fun. Séverin is the group’s de facto leader, a little ruthless and self-interested but not by any means heartless. Tristan is the little brother of the group, a lover of spiders and gardens. Enrique is the team’s historian, fascinated by puzzles and mysteries. Zofia is an engineer, she likes maths more than she likes most people and is also a big fan of fire. Laila is a dancer, beautiful and troubled, with a dark and mysterious past. Hypnos isn’t really part of the team to start off with, but he’s the patriarch of House Nyx and gets drawn into the story quite early.

There’s a lot of diversity in the main characters. Enrique is Spanish and Filipino, and bisexual. Laila is Indian, Séverin is French and Algerian, Hypnos is French and Haitian. Zofia is Polish, and also Jewish, and from her portrayal I believe she’s also autistic. The cultural identities didn’t just feel token, but part of the characters’ backgrounds and ongoing experiences.

I also enjoyed the friendships between the characters. There’s some fun banter in The Gilded Wolves, and the scenes where some or all of the group were sitting around working on a puzzle were some of my favourites.

The worldbuilding was more of a mixed bag

The world of The Gilded Wolves had a great atmosphere. It felt lush and exciting and a little dangerous. Where I felt like it fell down was in the details. I didn’t come away with a clear picture of the world or setting so much as a general vibe. I don’t think this is always a problem, although my preference is usually for stories to feel more clearly grounded in their settings. The writing was often beautifully descriptive, but in a few of the high-action moments I found it very difficult to picture what was going on. In some of these scenes I had to go back and re-read sections to try and piece together who was where, and what or where the threats were relative to the characters.

Its magic system was similarly exciting in the abstract but, to me at least, a little muddled in the details. Forging, the making of magic-imbued artifacts, seems to be the main (only?) magical output in this world. There were some exciting examples of Forged objects, and I liked the occasional exposition around different Forging affinities. I didn’t feel like we got a great sense of how the system works though, and I’d have liked to see a little more Forging in action!

Please don’t ask me to explain what happened in this book

At many, many points while reading this book, I was at least somewhat unclear as to what was going on. Sometimes I think this came back to my lack of clarity about the worldbuilding. The politics between the Houses, and indeed the roles of the Houses in society, felt vague to me. See also: Séverin’s position in society. This meant that there were moments where I wasn’t sure how important or relevant certain interactions were.

The balance of background information to directly-plot-relevant information felt off. At times we were getting a lot of information, but it wasn’t providing much insight into the scenario the characters were in. At other times it felt like a level of prior knowledge was being assumed, but my level of prior knowledge was limited-to-none and I felt pretty lost.

And we have to talk about the heist element. I picked up this book for two reasons. One: the cover is gorgeous. My opinion on this remains unchanged. Two: I’ve been seeing it recommended everywhere for people looking for fantasy heists. This, I think, is a little more contentious.

When I think of a fun heist story I think of a fairly specific arc, even if the details can vary significantly. I want to see the heist planned, I want to see the heist attempted. I want to see it go horribly wrong, in some capacity. And then the characters have to find their way out of the mess that the plan has become. This book has a couple of heist-like moments, but I never felt sure what was meant to happen, so I never knew whether things were going well or not. And the individual missions were often over quite quickly, so it was hard to get invested in their progress.

I had such high hopes for The Gilded Wolves

I know a lot of people have been raving about this book, and I really wanted to love it! Maybe that’s part of why I had such mixed feelings about it in the end. I’ve seen it compared to Six of Crows a lot, which I don’t love as a comparison. Not that I can’t see what people mean by that, but I think the two have very different feels. If you want more angsty characters with a found-family dynamic, this might scratch that itch. If you’re after a similarly clear-cut heist story, I think you’ll come away disappointed.

The Gilded Wolves is beautifully written and highly atmospheric. It’s got a diverse and entertaining cast of characters. I think the storyline is a little muddled, which undercuts some of the dramatic moments. I’m currently torn as to whether I’ll continue with the rest of The Gilded Wolves series. I’ll probably give book two a go. I want to see how some of the character backstories are further explored, and I’m curious about how some of the dynamics set up in book one will develop. But it’s not at the top of my TBR at the moment.

Have you read The Gilded Wolves? I’d love to know what you thought – and if you think I’m missing something, please let me know! I’m always interested in what other people loved about books that left me on the fence.

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