Gilded

Gilded is Marissa Meyer’s 2021 young adult novel, the first book in a duology that retells the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin in a richly imagined fantasy setting. The book takes place in the kingdom of Marchen, a country where the boundaries between the human world and the world of the Erlking, the dark hunter god of pagan myth, are dangerously thin during the Wild Hunt nights of midwinter.

Serilda is a young woman with one significant gift and one significant problem. She can tell stories that listeners cannot stop wanting to hear. The stories save her from the casual cruelty of her village and earn her the affection of the local children, but they also draw her into trouble she did not predict. When a chance encounter with the Erlking on a moonlit forest road leads her to spin one of her stories in a moment of panic, claiming that she can spin straw into gold, the Erlking decides to test the claim. Serilda is brought to his haunted castle where the impossible task of actually producing gold from straw is set before her, with the consequences for failure being precisely as terrible as the original Grimm tale would suggest.

The rescue arrives in the form of a mysterious young man called Gild, who agrees to spin the gold in exchange for items Serilda offers in payment. As the nights of the Wild Hunt continue and the Erlking continues to set new tasks, the bargains between Serilda and Gild grow more dangerous, and the slow unfolding of who Gild actually is and what trap they are both caught in drives the novel toward its devastating conclusion.

Marissa Meyer takes the relatively brief Grimm tale and expands it into a fully realized fantasy world. The mythology of the Erlking, drawn from the Wild Hunt traditions of Germanic folklore, gives the book a darker and more atmospheric flavor than her better known Lunar Chronicles. Serilda is a strong protagonist with the kind of quick mind and complicated moral situation that the source material requires, and Gild is one of Meyer’s most distinctive heroes.

For longtime Marissa Meyer fans, Gilded is a satisfying departure from the Lunar Chronicles into darker fairy tale territory. For new readers, this is a strong introduction. The duology continues with Cursed.