Deka is a village girl in Irfut who just wants to live a normal life and be proven as pure and belonging in her village. She wants to be able to get married and live a happy life. However, on the day of the Ritual of Purity, it is discovered that she is impure and has the cursed blood of demons inside her. As she underwent the Death Mandate but yet didn’t die, she is taken from Irfut to the Warthu Beru to train in an army of girls like her, an alaki army. As she and her friends train together and come to terms with the fact that they are demons, they succeed in killing multiple deathshrieks through Deka’s unnatural power of controlling them. Then, she learns that the deathshrieks are the alaki in another form and learns of the actual truth of her kind. Deka defies the emperor and awakens the true goddesses of their country, the Gilded Ones to return her country to its previous glory.
I thought this book had a really good plotline and a lot of female empowerment. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Sometimes, there were some points in the middle of the book that were a bit slow but overall The Gilded Ones was a great read. This is a good novel for those who like fantasy novels and female empowerment.
Finally, it was a great book and conveyed a lot of messages in the storyline.