Vic James

'Tarnished City' is the middle book in 'The Dark Gifts' trilogy, set in an alternative Britain which has been governed for centuries by the Equals, a set of ruthless, magically-gifted families who wiped out the royal family and their nobles and established themselves as the ruling class. The Equals' biggest achievement has been to normalise slavery. The widely accepted status quo requires that every non-magical person (almost all of the population) owes ten years of slavery to the Equals. show more The trilogy is a set of closely linked thrillers that show us this alternative Britain by following the lives of the adult children of two families whose lives have become closely linked and whose actions threaten the stability of the Equals' rule. One is the Jardine family, the most prominent family of Equals and the other is a normal family serving out their slave days.


https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/tarnished-city-by-vic-james


'Tarnished City' carries straight on from the explosive ending of 'Gilded Cage'. I created a problem for myself by leaving a gap of almost two years between the two books (I hadn't realised it had been that long. This is a series I wanted to read but you know how it is - too many books, too little time) so some of the details of the plot had faded in my memory and It took me a chapter or two to get back into the story. It wasn't a big problem as Vic James quickly caught me up on everything but I won't be leaving that kind of gap between the second and third books. Even so, once I got back into the dark flow of the story, I found it just as compelling as the first book.

The second book of any speculative fiction trilogy faces the dual problems that the world isn't as fresh and unknown as in the first book and it isn't going to resolve everything in the way that the third book will. The second book has to find a way of keeping the story moving, maintaining the tension, until it can deliver a significant milestone in the plot that raises the stakes for the players and sets up the situation the third book will have to resolve. I thought Vic James handled these second book problems really well.

She gave us something new by changing the settings for most of the action, taking us away from the Jardine Estate and the slave towns and moving us to a remote Scottish castle where magic is used to torture and torment mundane humans who have committed high-profile crimes against the Equals and taking us into the inside The House Of Light, the alternate Houses of Parliament from which the Equals govern.

She developed all of the main characters. The two mundanes are going through hell. Luke is locked away in a run by a sadist, populated with vicious criminals and organised so that the inmates inflict cruelty on one another. His sister, Abi, who wants to free Luke, is on a personal radicalisation path that leads her from 'I want to get the best deal for my family' to 'things need to be fairer' through 'We have to protest' to 'We have to burn the Equals to the ground'. The three Jardine sons also change over the course of the book. I entered thinking that one of them was harmless and ineffectually nice, one was entitled, unhappy and ridden by dangerous fits of anger and the third was a magically gifted, murderous sociopath. All of those positions changed. The 'nice' son gained some power and reverted to class type, the angry son is waking up and considering what he can do about the sources of his unhappiness. The murderous sociopath remains a murderous sociopath but one with a complicated agenda, an insatiable curiosity and the potential completely to change what being an Equal means.

She also broadens the political picture, fills out more of the historical detail and deepens our understanding of how the magic of the Equals works and what it might be capable of.

She embeds all of this in four story strands: Luke's life in the castle and how he might survive/escape it; Abi's involvement with the resistance group that slides inexorably from protest, to sabotage, to terrorism intended to trigger rebellion; the power struggle within the Equals as the head of the Jardine family establishes himself as an autocrat and the strange and surprising agenda of our young and horribly gifted sociopath.

She pulls these strands together so that each increases the tension in the other and there is a constant sense of moving forward towards an unknown but large-scale change.

The thing I liked most about the book was that Vic James doesn't demonise the Equals or lionise the mundanes. She shows them as people caught up in a situation not of their making. Some of them are very unpleasant. Some of them are what they are because they feel they have no choice and some, a very few, ask themselves who they should be and how they can become who they should be. Most of the sorrow and pain in this book comes from two things: the concentration of huge power in the hands of a small group who, over the generations, have come to believe themselves entitled to rule and the acceptance of slavery as a foundation stone of the social order. Without ever dropping into a polemic, Vic James shows us the way these two things rot the heart of a society. How institutionalising inequality and slavery diminishes the humanity of Equal and mundane.

I'm looking forward to the final book, 'Bright Ruin'. Even the title sounds ominous. show less

This book ripped me up mainly because of what America is going through right now; it was as if the author could foresee the future and know the wide disparity between classes would be happening in reality.

I felt the dialogue was realistic and it flowed well conversationally. So often there were things the characters said I’ve seen on social media or in TV interviews lately so it made these words all the more gut wrenching. Reading how even within the elite there were some who wanted to show more make things different and help but were being beaten back by those in power it was like watching the current protests come through the pages of this book.

The plot is well thought out, the story line is well written and overall I just felt the author did a magnificent job of capturing the political angst that occurs when you have a minority class of people in power oppressing the majority until the majority begins to snap, demanding their freedom and equality.

It was a bit like the British version of The Hunger Games but more political, you definitely get more from the ruling class in this book. There are some truly atrocious things done by those in power to the others and some of the acts were so gut wrenching it made it difficult to continue reading at times but that’s also a testament to the author’s writing ability to evoke that much emotion.
I think it very much speaks to the current political climate and I’m vastly curious to see where the author is going to take it from here particularly since it ends on a cliffhanger.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for allowing me to review this book. show less

In 'Gilded Cage', Vic James offers us an alternative version of modern Britain that I found grimly plausible. In James' Britain, everyone owes a decade of slavery to the magic-using elite that has ruled Britain since they executed Charles I in the seventeenth century. The elite, as well as having accumulated vast wealth through centuries of rule, each has the ability to use magic in ways that would allow any one of them to defeat an army.


Yet, their biggest achievement is in not having to use show more their power because they have convinced everyone that the status quo cannot and should not be changed. They have normalized slavery and made their role as rulers a fundamental part of national identity. They do this partly by letting people choose the decade in which they will serve out their slave days, partly by having humans manage the process of enslavement and the use of slaves and partly by presenting themselves as glamorous and admirable.


For me, what made this alternative Britain so plausible was that, if you take away the elite's use of magic, you're pretty close to how Tories like Jacob Rees-Mogg believe England should be. Over the past ten years, we've seen a steady growth in the gap between the wealthy and the rest, a relentless erosion of the Parliamentary power and the installation of leaders who see themselves above the law. What Vic James has done is show how Modern Britain might be if the Tories had had the ability to use magic that made them virtually invulnerable and had had three hundred years to consolidate their position.


'Gilded Cage' is not a political polemic or a dystopia built to deliver a message. It's a tense thriller, built around people we are meant to like who are doing the best that they can. It's also a fascinating look into how creatures with this much power might treat each other.


The main characters, human and elite, who drive the plot of 'Gilded Cage' are under twenty. Their inexperience helps with the world-building. It also gives the book a Young Adult tone that dampened the rage I should have been feeling at these magical Tory Tyrants.


The world-building at the heart of the story is filtered through the experience of two families, a human family from Manchester entering their slave years together and the elite family on their estate in the South that most of them are assigned to serve. One of the human family serves in Milmore, a Northern industrial slave town, giving us a contrast between the different experiences of slavery.


'Gilded Cage' works as a thriller. There are personal and political intrigues within the elite and significant acts of rebellion by the humans and holding them all together is a larger design, hard to see at first, by the youngest son of the elite family to use his power to change the world, although not necessarily for the better.


It was an entertaining, sometimes exciting, sometimes grim read with an ending that worked but which also left me keen to read the next book in the trilogy.


I recommend the audiobook version of 'Gilded Cage'. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.


https://soundcloud.com/pan-macmillan/gilded-cage-vic-james show less

Gilded Cage takes lots of familiar concepts and smushes them together to build a dystopian modern-day Britain where class is defined by magic. You have it and are Equal, or you don't - and you're not. Those without Skill are obliged to surrender ten years in slavery in what are effectively Victorian workhouses with modern machinery or in service at one of the Downton-a-like estates of the Equals (glittering, self-absorbed and often malicious).

Two teenage siblings lose their illusions as one show more is consigned to Kyneston, home to the all-powerful Jardines, and the other is sent to the hell of Millmoor. But a resistance is rising within its grimy streets. Can hope and trust overcome magical Skill? Will the Equals close ranks - or be torn apart by their own merciless politics?

This is an excellent debut, and I was quickly drawn in - although I'll admit to liking the secondary characters far more than protagonists Abi and Luke Hadley.

Full review

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. show less