booksofgeorgia 's review for:

Gold by Raven Kennedy

4.0

adventurous emotional medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

---

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

‘Gold’ is the fifth book in the Plated Prisoner series and, much like the fourth book, I struggled to get into it at first. But that ending? I’m glad I waited until the final book was released to read this as I need to know what happens ASAP. 

As always, I absolutely loved Kennedy’s writing and the formatting in these books is just so unique. I love the use of changing font sizes, black pages, indentations - all of it is so different to any other books I’ve read. I also think the different POVs work in this series, especially when the main characters are in different settings, making sure we always know what’s happening to each of them. 

This series is definitely at its best when Auren and Slade are together on the page, though, which was definitely lacking in book five of the series. I missed their chemistry and felt their individual journeys were somewhat boring at the beginning. Even dotted with Osrik’s angry moping and Malina’s frigid stubbornness, I felt like all four of these storylines would have been much better in smaller doses, rather than taking up half a book. There were so many chapters with a whole lot of nothing happening.

To be honest, I just don’t care about Malina at all. Sure, she had a breakthrough with some character development in this book, but I do not enjoy reading about her. At least Dommik made her chapters a bit more interesting, but at this point I’d take Midas' resurrection and more of his chapters over Malina’s.

The last half of the book definitely bumped my rating up from three stars to four. There were so many reveals and plot twists that I simply didn’t see coming, and that ending left me absolutely DEVASTATED. I was planning on waiting a little before reading the final book and finishing this series, but I think I’m going to need answers sooner. 

It’s a shame that the first half was so slow, given how riveting the conclusion was, and I do think there could have been some culling of pages within that first half. I absolutely love Raven Kennedy as an author and will always support her works, especially with how in love I am with the first three books in this series. Hopefully the final installment can be the redemption of the last three books. 🤞🏻