Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Gideon The Ninth by Tamsin Muir starts right in the midst of things, and I had very little idea of what was actually happening.
But that was okay, because it was entertaining. Gideon is totes likeable. She’s interesting, she’s proactive, she ticks a lot of the boxes for a well-rounded protagonist. While it took a little while to figure out what this whole world was about, it was entertaining.
Besides, I think it’s sort of part and parcel of reading the higher echelons of sci-fi/fantasy that you spend a good deal of time at the start being quite lost. Steep learning curves are just how the genres work, this is especially true when you’re willing to read series with 5+ books (The Locked Tomb currently sports 4 books plus some smaller additions).
And I liked Gideon the Ninth, even though it felt a little overwritten. This world sits on the SFF spectrum with elements of both genres, but leans more into the sci-fi.
Once you get past the overwriting, it’s a relatively easy read.
It’s mainly character driven, Gideon The Ninth and Harrowhark Nonagesimus being the main attraction. And they’re a charming pair, their mutual hatred of each other is entertaining and delicious to snack on.
They’ve got quite a tragic friendship around which all the action in this book are written, and I daresay that the most satisfying part of the story was Harrow and Gideon finding each other.
That doesn’t mean there’s any romance. It’s even categorised in ‘romance’, but what I read doesn’t even really qualify as a romantic subplot. While you’re beaten over the head with how gay Gideon is, her and Harrow’s relationship is more like a long-standing, fucked-up friendship mired in tragic circumstances.
Unless by romance they meant Gideon having a passing crush on Dulcinea? Or Sextus being in love with Dulcinea since forever? Nah, nope, no matter which way I turn it, I can’t find enough to qualify this for the romance shelf.
Anyway.
The necromantic world they inhabit is interesting and unlike anything I’ve seen before.
The magic is interesting and I like how one kind of magic manifests in different ways, and how this has been organised into different houses.
Gideon and Harrow are quite young, and for their age as well as for the distinctive young voice of the book, full of fire and snark, this feels like a YA book. But it very much isn’t, because it gets pretty gruesome.
It’s not unlike a high-stakes island mystery (but isn’t one). While the mystery drives much of the plot forward, there aren’t any decipherable clues for the reader to be able to guess the outcome. The resolution smells of deus ex machina, and is a set-up for the bigger story unfolding in the rest of the series.
In the right mood, reading this book is amusing. In the wrong mood, it’s tiresome and annoying.
Some of the worldbuilding sets this book apart.
The world is populated by a necromantic society, each world (house) specialising in its own distinct form of necromancy. The world is atmospheric and campy.
This idea that these magic-users specialise in different aspects of death and the soul is fascinating, but there isn’t a lot of exploration into these techniques, their existence dominated more by the rule of cool. This only further adds to this feeling like a YA book.
That and the snarky, contemporary, hip kids lingo, which doesn’t always flow naturally. Because of the way it’s (over)written, a lot of words and phrases feel like they were slipped in from a long list of Phrases To Include In The Book, rather than coming from the mouth of the characters themselves.
There are many anachronisms like this (inlcuding a “that’s what she said”) which could be explained by being the remnants of a previous culture, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like the author simply using modern language as a shorthand for establishing Gideon’s rule of cool.
And I often found it unnecessary, because the characterisation is solid, and could have stood on it’s own without the gimmicks.
Even when we’re introduced to the other eight houses, things could start to get really muddy with a large cast, but Muir helps us along with hints like, “Oh, the Fourth and their ghosts…” and going as far as naming the people from the houses according to their house numbers; Sextus, Septimus, Octakiseron etc.
There’s a fair bit of humour.
Some of it’s situational, some descriptive, and some of it from the snark. And other times, there’s humour forced on you by the snark that isn’t funny.
Once the main story gets underway, you really start to feel a lack of worldbulding. There aren’t enough details to create a sense of any cultural, historical, political or magical frameworks within which the characters are operating. The magic works as it is needed, the Emperor Undying has ruled his empire of undetermined size for the past 10,000 years and there’s a war happening off in the distance (which was Gideon’s original goal, but fades into the back as we move through the story).
This is very clearly a set-up for events in following books, and without a satisfying ending, we’re just left to pick up the next book to see if any of it starts making sense.
While I think it’s good to leave readers with some questions at the end of a book, I still want a satisfying ending that will do for now, and the end here more kind of just fizzled out rather than left me with something substantial.
The pacing doesn’t do the story any favours.
The story is divided into five acts.
The first act takes place on the Ninth world, where we meet Gideon attempting to escape for the umpteenth time.
Then events move us to the First World and Canaan House where Harrowhark is taking part in the Lyctor trials with Gideon as her sworn sword.
In the first act, the voice and story very strongly suggest a YA book about Gideon venturing into her first steps of independence and finding her destiny. But as soon as we reach the second act, the feel of the story changes significantly, delving more into an exercise in setting and characters with little happening in the way of the plot moving forward.
Then the third raises the stakes, the fourth act is the build-up to the boss battle in act five. And the fifth act did feel like it just rolled in out of nowhere, threw a bunch of (what was supposed to be) epic stuff at you (but was actually more repetition from previous events), and then left with a double-flip and a curse, fizzling into the sunset.
The pacing as a whole is like driving a car that periodically stalls. You get it running and it runs on for a bit, sometimes with you less worried that it’s just all going to fall apart on the road than others, and then it stalls again.
This is another one of those stories that feels like the author might have wanted to explore more themes and told more stories, but in order to make a book palatable for courting adaptations, stuck to the more Hollywood style of telling stories. But, sadly, if this ever does get adapted, it’ll be one of those adaptations where we’ll be hoping they fix the issues when writing the script.
This book has received a lot of praise, and I have to say it’s mostly about style while wholly ignoring substance.
While the book does get very gruesome at points (it has necromancers, duh), the characters never really got a framework for their morality, and so I didn’t find myself really horrified at any point.
So, having dogged on this book for its lack of substance and poor pacing, I still enjoyed it enough to continue the series. There were future events set up in this book which will hopefully come up in the rest of the series.
Gideon The Ninth is a kind of bad-for-you snack that you nonetheless end up wolfing down (and potentially paying for later).
I think these books have a distinct voice and will absolutely appeal to readers younger than me (so the ones in the YA/NA bracket). And they will probably be better at ignoring the lack of substance and just revel in the vibes of it all, filling in the gaps with fan art and fan fiction.
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
