A Disappointing Debut | The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

Generally speaking, The Gilded Ones is an almost-great YA fantasy about an army of outcast magical girls in a West African-inspired universe. This book includes many tropes that are staples of the fantasy genre: found families, “monstrous” girls who aren’t so monstrous, magical boarding school (in this case, magical military training), and yes, the Chosen One. Although I did not like this book at all for the reasons discussed below, I want to emphasize at the top that The Gilded Ones has all the ingredients for an excellent story. Also, this isn’t a review where I complain that super-special Chosen One heroines are bad writing, actually—my private thoughts on the chosen one trope notwithstanding, BIPOC girls deserve the same stories that were previously only permitted to white characters.

All that being said, though: I didn’t like this book. Taking aside my many opinions on the plot (formulaic, predictable, etc.), my major complaint is that The Gilded Ones isn’t written very well. Good writing can sell even the wackiest concepts; likewise, poor writing can tank even the most promising plot.

For one thing, it seems as if Namina Forna is too eager to hand-hold her readers in a way that’s patronizing rather than age-appropriate. Whenever she has a point to make, either about the characterization of her protagonist or commentary on society as a whole, the author does the literary equivalent of putting the point in bolded, 100-pt text.

Example: you want to have a moment where the main character has an epiphany and suddenly realizes her culture is repressive and patriarchal?

Our whole lives, we’ve been taught to make ourselves smaller, weaker than men. That’s what the Infinite Wisdoms teach—that being a girl means perpetual submission…. The truth is, girls have to wear smiling masks, contort themselves into all kind of knots to please others, and then, when the deathshrieks come, girls die. They die.

Boom.

Or, do you want to insert a heavy-handed message that people shouldn’t be judged for their sexual experience? Why not have your entire cast of characters sit in a circle and proceed to mechanically catalogue each character’s sexual history (or lack thereof)? Then, to really drive your point home, why not have your protagonist think:

Keita is right, of course. Virginity, no virginity—the choice should be a personal one.

Feels like a high school sex ed class, to be honest.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate Forna’s intent here. Rather, it’s her method. Real teenagers probably don’t sit down, have a systematic show-and-tell of their sex lives, then think at the end of it: “the decision to have sex is personal and not something to be judgmental about!” The Gilded Ones may be intended for younger readers, but 14-year-olds don’t need to be spoon-fed in the way Forna does throughout the text. Whether she’s telling readers about her characters’ feelings, their relationships, or various social issues, every major plot point is written with all the subtlety of the Vegas Strip.

I get that I’m not a teenager anymore and therefore not this book’s intended audience, but anecdotally? The reason I didn’t read a bunch of YA as a teen was because this kind of patronizing, overly simplistic storytelling style was very prevalent a decade ago. Teens get talked down to by various adults in their lives on the regular; they don’t need it from their fiction as well.

However, even the childish narration itself isn’t my main complaint about The Gilded Ones. Instead, my biggest problem with this book is that even though it’s a comparatively lengthy book, Forna rushed through or altogether skipped the important bits.

You know the part of the action movie where the hero begins to prepare to accomplish their quest and the film veers into a training sequence accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack? (i.e., jousting in the woods in A Knight’s Tale, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” in Mulan, etc.) Or how in a romcom, the script will bridge the gap between the meet cute and the big misunderstanding by inserting the ubiquitous “falling in love montage”? So…The Gilded Ones is basically one big montage. And it doesn’t work.

The first few chapters of the novel establish the setting, the conflict, and the stakes. Then protagonist Deka arrives at the training camp where she and the other monster-girls will be turned into the emperor’s private army. From that point until the beginning of the final battle sequence, every single chapter begins with a time-skip. Sometimes a few days, sometimes several weeks, but always a jump forward in time. Thus, the majority of the story takes the form of extended recaps/summaries of events, interspersed with real-time scenes for occasional flavor. It’s like when you’re rewatching a favorite movie for the twentieth time, but fast-forwarding through most of it in order to get to the good bits.

Because of this narrative choice, virtually all the heavy-lifting in terms of character development is necessarily done off-page. One day Deka has crippling self-hatred and thinks she’s a monster; in the next chapter, she’s “accepted” her unique heritage and is urging her fellow girl-soldiers to swear blood oaths and curse the gods. How did we get from Point A to Point B? Ditto the romance—it’s not an issue of instalove so much as…when did Deka and her love interest even interact? The bonding they do as soldiers united for a common cause is glossed over and never shown in real-time.

I’m willing to bet that the overreliance on expository passages is due in large part to Forna’s background as a screenwriter. In a movie, it’s okay to rush through the “downtime” and rely on the big scenes to anchor the story. It’s also okay to use the falling in love montage to sell your romantic arc. But books are different. If 250 pages of your 450 page book is skimming over things that happen between the beginning and the end, you’re not actually writing a book. You’re just writing a summary of a book. Recap-style voiceovers work okay on screen; in the pages of the book, they’re merely boring.

tl;dr: The Gilded Ones has several good ideas, but has poor follow-through.