Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

[sophia_sol]

NOBODY WARNED ME THIS BOOK IS HORROR. THIS BOOK IS HORROR. FYI.

Okay. Okay! I'm fine! This book was just..........a little more than I was expecting, you know? I was promised lesbians and snark and and swordfighting and bone magic. And yes, there was all that, but there was also a very generous serving of horror. I'm not a horror person. I am a wuss. But by the time it dawned on me what the book was doing it was too late and I was invested and I am absolutely going to read the sequels too once they're out.

It possibly should have dawned on me earlier that the book was horror given that it is entirely about necromancers, but like, you can do a lot of different things with necromancers? Because horror is really more about the tone and the narrative approach than it is about the Actual Things That Happen in a given story. And I don't read enough horror to be able to recognize it creeping up on me.

ANYWAY.

The book started out actually pretty boring to me for the entire first act (which is like, 80 pages!) and I nearly gave up on it because that is so long to have a boring intro go on for. The thing is that I personally find Gideon and Harrow far more interesting once there are other non-Ninth people around for them to a) interact with and b) be compared to. I was pretty uninterested in either of them or their fraught relationship with each other, for the whole first act. But I was very into all that for the rest of the book! And I do recognize the import of the stuff we're shown in the first act for setting the stage for everything else, but it would have been nice if it could have been a bit more efficient about it.

The rest of the book is really good though. There were a lot of things I kept on noticing to be impressed with, though of course now that I'm done reading I can't remember a single one. Idk. Skillfully written book, very engaging, very interesting and unusual. It's worth reading! (At least, if you're a person who can handle a certain amount of horror.)

Comments

[skygiants]

I also found the whole thing significantly more interesting once the other kids turned up - alas that most of my favorites of the other kids ended up dead, but so it goes! 😬

[sophia_sol]

I mean, basically EVERYONE died so it's not hard to catch one's favourites in that situation! But yeah. I was so sad when Terrible Teen Jeannemary died, I was really charmed by her! And also charmed by how much Gideon saw Jeannemary as being clearly a baby teen and meanwhile I was like...GIDEON YOU ARE ALSO SO OBVIOUSLY TEENAGED.

[skygiants]

I also was really sad about the deaths of the Fourth (and also ... confused by them? I still don't understand why they were top priority for murder!) The terrible muttering teens were indeed very charming. :(

[sophia_sol]

Yeah it was DEFINITELY not sufficiently addressed why they were so singled out like that, which was frustrating! Which were your favourites amongst the others?

[skygiants]

Predictably enough, I also liked the Fifth and Sixth. They all seemed nice! I guess technically one of the Sixth did survive and they never found Palamades' body .... what about you?

[sophia_sol]

I actually struggled super hard with keeping track of all the characters - first name AND last name AND role/house AND physical descriptor for 17 people and you only get one of those at a time usually, it was a lot for me to keep track of so for many of them I was only just barely getting a handle on who they were before they died. I definitely loved Fifth though! Sixth....I enjoyed the twin dynamic (this was the house with the twins, right??) but I struggled remembering the cavalier's name for too long to keep track of what he was like.

I really enjoyed Dulcinea, because she was both genuinely nice AND clearly has some serious shit going on beneath the surface. Which like. YUP WAS THAT EVER AN UNDERSTATEMENT in the end!

[skygiants]

Sixth wasn't the twins, it was the nerdy lad who was in love with real!Dulcinea and his patiently practical cavalier! The twins were interesting but I had no emotional attachment to them, but I did also find Dulcinea fascinating, with ... as it turned out .... reason .........

[sophia_sol]

Oh! Sixth was Camilla, right! I did like her and her necromancer!

I didn't develop emotional attachment to many of them because of my aforementioned issues with keeping track of them, so it was mostly about who I found interesting rather than who I cared about. The only strong emotional attachments I was able to develop were for Gideon and Harrow

[cahn]

OH GOOD I wasn't the only one to be seriously confused as to which house went with which names. Like, it was usually clear from context but I never quite got all the houses straight for more than a couple of pages (and by now I've forgotten them all).

[michelel72]

Oh, man, surprise!horror is not my bag, either.

I really like Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, even though much of her work can be said to have horror elements. When she announced her most recent work, she was very up-front that it's a horror piece, and I super appreciate that because if she's drawing that distinction, I can be sure it's not for me!

[sophia_sol]

Yes, I am SO GRATEFUL to Ursula Vernon for making it clear that The Twisted Ones is horror, because T Kingfisher is otherwise basically an auto-buy for me but I knew I would not be able to handle a book she explicitly says is horror!

[pauraque]

I didn't know that book was horror either! Based on the bits I'd heard about it, I was imagining something very different.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, people reviewing the book who mention tone tend to focus on Gideon's irreverent voice, which is not something I would naturally associate with a horror vibe at all!

[chestnut_pod]

May I ask what kind of horror it is? Is it a sort of gory horror, eldritch horror, or suspense horror, or *gulp* all at once?

[sophia_sol]

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the tropes of horror to trust my ability to categorize, but I'd say it's not eldritch but is both gory and suspenseful?

[chestnut_pod]

Thanks very much!

[cahn]

The thing is that I personally find Gideon and Harrow far more interesting once there are other non-Ninth people around for them to a) interact with and b) be compared to. I was pretty uninterested in either of them or their fraught relationship with each other, for the whole first act. But I was very into all that for the rest of the book!

yesssss! All this!

Heh, I was not expecting you to be one of the people who had read this, because the whole time I was reading I was like "wow, this is basically a horror book!"

[sophia_sol]

lol yeah I think that if I had known going in that this book was horror I wouldn't have read it, but.....I think I'm glad I didn't know, because I'm glad to have read it? These books are an extremely compelling experience, and I'm glad to have gone along for the ride, despite the various troubles I had with remembering characters and so forth.