Took me way too long to finish this due to health problems but just as fantastic as the first one. I will warn you though that this one is extremely dark and deals with some really dark topics and scenes. So trigger warning for rape, abuse, torture, gore and mass violence. ( )

Loved that the plot does not go where I expected. Will definitely read the third book. ( )

'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. 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.
( )

4.5/5 *

TARNISHED CITY is an amazing follow-up to last year's GILDED CAGE. In fact, I think I liked this one just a little bit more!

Even though I see this listed and shelved as YA, it's much darker than most YA I've tried, (which admittedly is not a lot because it's usually too angst-y for me.) In this case however, the author nixes a lot of the extraneous stuff and focuses on the characters and the intricately plotted story.

It took me a little while to get back into the flow, (it's been just over a year since I've visited this world), but once I did, I was so happy to be there! There's no real re-cap, which I appreciated. I feel that if an author's characters are strong enough, they should come back without my having to be reminded and these certainly did. There's a big cast here and the characters refer to other characters using the names by which they know them-sometimes resulting in 2 or 3 different names for a person, depending upon the point of view at the time.

I noted that a lot of what is going on in this book is going on in the real world right now. Perhaps not slavery exactly, (those with no Skill must serve 10 years as a slave), but classism, (against those born with no Skill), and the increasingly outspoken attitudes and acceptance of those with racist views. It comes all the way up to the sanction of violence against those who disagree or who dare to stand up against those in power. I guess I'm trying to say that it's obvious to me that the author knows what she's talking about as far as how the story relates to the world today, and it's downright scary.

I feel like I needed to make these points, but now that I have, I want to say how much I loved this tale! I loved the characters, they're well drawn and oh, so human. They aren't perfect, in fact, many of them are downright horrible people, but they're fun to read about. The machinations and the conniving going on rival that in any adult fantasy that I've read-with the added bonus of not having to wait 5 years for the next book!

I say BRAVO, Vic James! You've created a compelling, fun and interesting world, populated with deep, complicated characters and I can't wait to come back to it once again. Highly recommended!

*Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the e-ARC of this book, in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it!* ( )

** spoiler alert ** I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I have really enjoyed this series so far and this book, as the second in the series, certainly lived up to my expectations. This book picks up right where book one ended. Abi has made it to the home of an Equal that is helping fight against the Jardines. are trying to bring back the old way of running the country where slavery is expected and the Equals are absolute in their rule. Luke is still a prisoner with Crovan but has made an ally of the maid Coira and together they are unlocking clues that may lead to their freedom. Many of the Jardine siblings also seem to changing in their views of how the country has been run and surprisingly Gavar Jardine may be the biggest ally of all. The book ends on a huge cliffhanger and I will definitely be looking out for the third book of this epic trilogy. ( )