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Choosing The Gilded Ones as my next book to read was a risk, not only because I was initially drawn to the striking cover, but also because I am not a particularly ‘young adult’. Despite being unfamiliar with such jeopardy, the risk paid off. Plunged into the ancient kingdom of Otera we meet sixteen year-old Deka on the verge of the ‘Ritual of Purity’, carried out to find out if any girls are ‘demons’ who need to be weeded out of society. Deka tries to solve the mystery of her origins whilst training in the emperor’s army to defend the population from marauding ‘deathshrieks’ terrorising the kingdom. There are echoes of the author’s upbringing in Sierra Leone in her cinematic descriptions, and everything is not what it seems in Otera’s deeply patriarchal society.
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