The Gilded Ones

78 pages • 2 hours read

The Gilded Ones

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Introduction

Before Reading

During Reading

After Reading

During Reading

Reading Questions & Paired Texts

Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

CHAPTERS 1-3

Reading Check

1. As the story opens, what important event does Deka anticipate with both dread and excitement?

2. What does the beautifully sewn gown and mask left by her mother symbolize to Deka?

3. What sways Deka to accept White Hands’s offer?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What accounts for the differences between how Deka feels about the approaching ritual and how Elfriede feels about it?

2. What is ironic about the choice White Hands offers?

3. What is the nature of Deka’s inner conflict?

Paired Resource

“Issue of Blood Quantum”

This short opinion piece by Raven Madison (Eyak) examining blood quantum as a colonial tool of oppression and erasure offers students a real-world comparison for discussing the role of blood purity in systems of oppression.
This content connects to the theme Discrimination Based on Differences.
The concept of blood purity, as well as sexual purity, has a long history as a tool of social control and oppression. How do both blood quantum and the Ritual of Purity play roles in systemic oppression? What are the social, political, and mental ramifications for those targeted?

CHAPTERS 4-8

Reading Check

1. What is the real point of the Ritual of Purity?

2. What is the importance of Hemaira?

3. How long is the alaki’s servitude?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What is the nature of the relationship between Deka and Britta?

2. What role might the equus twins Braima and Masaima play in highlighting key themes and ideas?

3. What is special about the status of soldiers?

CHAPTERS 9-17

Reading Check

1. What is Warthu Bera?

2. What is the significance of the Umbra?

3. How does Britta characterize Deka’s ability to sense deathshrieks?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What effect does Belcalis’ blasphemy have on Deka?

2. What does Deka’s speech to the women and subsequent blood oath show about her?

3. How do her attitudes regarding her unique ability to sense and command deathshrieks shift and why?

Paired Resource

“8 Greek Words for Love That Will Make Your Heart Soar”

This brief article offers vocabulary for differentiating various forms of love; this information might be helpful in supplying language and descriptions to categorize relationships in the novel. (Teacher-appropriate; not student-facing due to mature content)
This resource connects to the theme The Power of Love.

CHAPTERS 18-25

Reading Check

1. What is the drawback of Deka’s powerful voice?

2. What title does Captain Kelechi give to Deka?

3. Who ended the Death Mandate and provided the alaki the choice to serve the emperor?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why is the first journey outside of the walls of Warthu Bera a pivotal moment in Deka’s character development?

2. In what ways does Deka identify with the plight of the deathshrieks?

3. In what way do Deka and Belcalis’s attitudes toward White Hands’s work in ending the Death Mandate differ?

Paired Resource

“The Gilded Ones author Namina Forna on Fleeing Sierra Leone and Confronting the American Dream”

This essay in Elle can be used to examine the connection between Forna’s experiences in both Sierra Leone and the United States and the novel.
The content of the article connects to the themes of Discrimination Based on Differences and Coming of Age.
War shaped both Forna’s upbringing and Deka’s. What parallels do you see between Forna’s experiences in leaving Sierra Leone to live in the United States and Deka’s experiences leaving her village? What aspects of Deka’s reclaiming of her identity are echoed by Forna’s experiences as an African in the United States?

CHAPTERS 26-31

Reading Check

1. What does Deka suspect White Hands is using her to do?

2. What ironic mode of death is Britta’s True Death?

3. What is the cost of saving Britta from her True Death?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why does Deka identify with Rattle?

2. What is wrong with Keita’s advice that Deka must remain silent about her ability to understand the deathshrieks’ language because it would “upend the natural order”? (Chapter 28)

3. What might be the point of the virginity talk regarding the story and its deeper themes?

Paired Resource

“Can We Unlearn Implicit Biases?”

This APA interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, Harvard professor pioneering studies of implicit bias, includes both audio and transcript and provides students with an academic lens for viewing the role of bias in the politics and mores of fictional Otera.
This information connects to the themes Discrimination Based on Differences and The Power of Love.
How have implicit biases impacted the major characters thus far? In what ways does the group’s virginity talk offer an example of processes of unlearning implicit bias and how might Deka’s character development reveal the author’s beliefs about what conditions are necessary for unlearning biases?

CHAPTERS 32-37

Reading Check

1. Who is the leaper that alerts Deka to the reality of her war with the deathshrieks?

2. Why did Deka and the others have to suffer as alaki before fulfilling their destinies in White Hands’s well-laid schemes?

3. What does Katya’s story reveal as a major motivator in the cycles of violence between humans and deathshrieks?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What does the irony of Deka’s first deathshriek encounter in her home village reveal in terms of deeper themes?

2. What accounts for the emperor’s downfall?

3. What great realization does Deka come to when she reunites with her sisters-at-arms and their uruni?

“The Hill We Climb”

Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman speaks of a transition of power coming out of a time of fear and violence with hope for a brighter future.
Shared themes include Discrimination Based on Differences and The Power of Love.
Gorman speaks of the transition of power and the work ahead for the United States. How might themes and images in Gorman’s poem relate to and capture the work ahead for Deka even as she pauses to celebrate her current triumphs?

Recommended Next Reads

We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faisel

Both Zafira and Nasir dutifully wear the masks society expects of them, she disguised as the male Hunter and he as the feared Prince of Death. When they are set on a quest to recover an ancient artifact, however, Zafira and Nasir will learn that the masks they wear need not define them.
Shared themes include Discrimination Based on Differences, Coming of Age as the Chosen One, and The Power of Love
Shared topics include coming of age, romance, mythology-inspired settings, the search for identity, conflicts of morality, ancient secrets, and found family.
We Hunt the Flame on SuperSummary

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh

When Mina’s brother Joon intervenes in the village’s sacrifice of his beloved, Shim Cheong, as a bride to the wrathful Sea God, Mina offers herself to save them both from their fates. Beneath the waves in the distant Spirit Realm, Mina discovers that the Sea God is not wrathful but caught in an enchanted sleep; she sets out to break the spell despite the dangers of the Spirit Realm.
Shared themes include The Power of Love and Connections Between the Human and the Divine
Shared topics include coming of age, romance, mythology-inspired settings, ancient secrets, and found family.
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea on SuperSummary

Reading Questions Answer Key

CHAPTERS 1-3

Reading Check

1. The Ritual of Purity (Chapter 1)

2. Her mother’s love (Chapter 2)

3. Promise of freedom and absolution after 20 years of fighting (Chapter 3)

Short Answer

1. Because she is a Northerner and not already suspected to be “other” like Deka, Elfriede is more excited and looks forward to the time when she can don her mask and marry. Deka, however, knows the stakes are high both for her, a child of a Southerner, and for her father, whose family has had a history of women bleeding gold; consequently, she cannot help but worry about further ostracism and death. (Chapter 1)

2. However cleverly packaged, Deka’s options are suffering death at the hands of the village priest or on the battlefield. (Chapter 3)

3. Before the ritual, Deka was already marked differently and discriminated against as a Southerner; after the Ritual of Purity, her struggles with her own self-worth and pride intensify as not only the village but her closest family violent turn against her. She consequently internalizes the violent misogyny of the villagers. (Chapters 1-3)

CHAPTERS 4-8

Reading Check

1. To legitimize murder (Chapter 4)

2. Hemaira is the capital and the emperor’s seat of power. (Chapter 6)

3. 20 years (Chapter 8)

Short Answer

1. Though Deka and Britta come from different walks of life, they are bonded in their shared otherness and lack of agency, and they form an alliance to combat their loneliness, terror, and vulnerability. (Chapter 4)

2. The very sentient and yet very horse-like twins Braima and Masaima stand out as different but exhibit pride and self-assurance, qualities Deka has yet to learn. Their love for each other and for themselves helps them celebrate their differences and bear the discrimination they might experience in a human society that is quick to label those different as demons and to enslave other animal-like creatures as beasts of burden. (Chapters 6-7)

3. Unlike women in Otera, soldiers have rights, and so it is implied that the alaki will have rights if they remain soldiers. (Chapter 7)

CHAPTERS 9-17

Reading Check

1. The House of Women/Deka’s training place (Chapter 10)

2. Sign of the emperor’s Shadows (imperial assassins) (Chapter 11)

3. Valuable (Chapter 13)

Short Answer

1. When Belcalis insists that purity is an illusion and worth nothing at all, Deka and Britta are appalled, but for Deka, the radical claim also helps her to see that the world is more complicated than she imagined. It also reassures her that her own beliefs may be a choice: She might want to choose a different path than that taught by the priests. (Chapter 9)

2. Deka has come to terms with her differences and sees the value and advantages they give her in the coming battles. When she offers the other alaki the choice between being women or demons, she is choosing to reclaim the negative label and recreate it in her image with her sisters-at-arms, a sign that she is moving closer to finding her identity and the love she has sworn to survive to experience. (Chapter 14)

3. Initially, Deka is worried that her unique ability to sense and command deathshrieks means she is a demon like them, but Britta thinks her ability to sense them could be useful and therefore valuable to the karmokos and their plans. For the first time, Deka sees her differences as an asset rather than hindrance. Just as she gains confidence, however, Katya’s death and Keita’s concern that others will view her powers as unnatural cause Deka to worry that she is being used by the karmokos the same way the priests used her gilded blood. (Chapter 16)

CHAPTERS 18-25

Reading Check

1. Exhaustion (Chapter 19)

2. Demon of Demons (Chapter 21)

3. White Hands (Chapter 25)

Short Answer

1. When she first arrives in Warthu Bera, Deka is ashamed of herself and lacks confidence, allowing the insults of others to diminish her. As she departs for the raid, leaving safety behind, Deka refuses to shrink from the mob and even challenges their hateful words with her newly developed voice. (Chapter 21)

2. When she commands the contingent of deathshrieks, Deka must come to terms with the brutality she is enabling. She too has been made vulnerable by the commands of the priests and been dismembered and bled dry for their spoils. Watching the recruits carve the bodies makes her remember her time in the cellar, and she begins to wonder if the absolution she seeks is worth the moral weight on her soul. (Chapter 23)

3. Whereas Deka first takes the news as a sign that White Hands has not deceived her and is making good on her promises to the alaki, Belcalis is quick to point out their precarious position and the unnecessary suffering that disbanding the Death Mandate cannot ever erase. Their traumas endure and shape them; as Belcalis points out, even if laws change at the emperor’s whim, public opinion is slower to change and laws condemning them are just as easily created. (Chapter 25)

CHAPTERS 26-31

Reading Check

1. Start a rebellion/coup (Chapter 26)

2. Being impaled in the stomach (Chapter 27)

3. Deka’s “humanity”/ Gazal’s free will (Chapter 31)

Short Answer

1. After understanding the wild deathshrieks’ conversation and coming to understand that they are not beasts, Deka visits Rattle and realizes that Rattle only appeared beastlike because the karmokos drugged their captives. Unable to speak or name the oppression and used as a pawn in White Hands’s secret campaign, Deka understands that not only is she in the same position, but that she might also be a monster. (Chapter 27)

2. The “order” to which Keita refers when he recommends Deka keep silent is not natural, but rather a social custom and worldview that can and should be adapted or changed by the new knowledge she has discovered. Keeping silent will only preserve the power of the elite, not uphold nature itself, which includes deathshrieks and alaki alike, as well as Deka. (Chapter 28)

3. This interaction between the alaki and their uruni showcases the love and unity within the group, as they are able to discuss each other’s biases about sex, destigmatize the choice to engage in sexual activity or not, and feel safe enough to share personal details with each other without facing shame or discrimination for their different choices. It also delegitimizes the strictest ideas of purity that govern Otera’s priesthood and disadvantage women by alluding to Belcalis’s lack of choice in so many of her sexual encounters. (Chapter 30)

CHAPTERS 32-37

Reading Check

1. Katya (Chapter 32)

2. To gain empathy (Chapter 33)

3. Fear (Chapter 34)

Short Answer

1. In Deka’s ignorance about her origins and fear of the other, she lashed out at those who were sent to rescue her from the priests, leading to their deaths and her imprisonment. This speaks to ignorance and fear as the source of discrimination that leads to cycles of hate and violence. Also, it reveals how much a person can internalize their oppression and become the agent of their own suffering. (Chapter 34)

2. The emperor’s downfall may be attributed to hubris because he and the jatu are imposing an order that runs counter to the goddesses themselves. His more consequential weakness, however, is a rejection of love. Rather than embrace the Gilded Ones as his loving mothers or seeing the shared likenesses between the jatu and the alaki, he chooses to maintain his power and the status quo. What he does not realize is that power maintained through violence, fear, and ignorance is weaker than power born from love and loyalty. Deka, representing the power of love, loyalty, and knowledge, appears to be weaker, but in fact love is able to overcome fear and hate. (Chapter 35)

3. Deka has been motivated both by her quest for her true self and her deep desire to experience the kind of unconditional love Britta described with her parents and Katya with her betrothed. Surrounded by her closest friends and allies who trust her and see her through to the end despite fear, Deka realizes she possesses what she was after all along. (Chapter 36)