Book Review: Gideon the Ninth

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir


The vibe of this book is a dark, non-misogynistic version of the Chronicles of Amber. It’s fantasy, but it’s also on distant planets. It’s got clear characters, but the details felt loosely sketched in. It’s the first book I’ve read in a long time where I encountered words I didn’t know (actual English words, not invented ones, though it had those too), which impressed me greatly. The plot is part Survivor(™), part Agatha Christie closed-door cozy mystery, and part cabin-in-the-woods type horror.

Gideon has been trying to escape for years and Harrowhark keeps preventing her from doing so, mostly out of malice. Gideon and Harrowhark are sworn enemies in the way that only two kids who were raised together can be. Harrowhark’s specialty is making animated skeletons out of mere scraps of bone, and Gideon loves fighting and loves her two-handed sword more than any person. In this land, all magic is necromancy, and the nine houses are all sworn to the undying emperor, some kind of divine lich-king. Harrowhark is basically the crown princess of the ninth house and Gideon is a foundling who arrived under mysterious circumstances, but describing it that way makes it sound much more conventional. For one thing, Gideon is snarky AF, and while Harrowhark has the power to command her living servants to obey, there aren’t a lot of living people there. Even Harrowhark’s parents are dead, animated like puppets by Harrowhark’s necromantic power.

The emperor has summoned the scions of all the houses to a distant planet for a challenge to become Lyctor. But every necromancer needs a cavalier, and Gideon is the best candidate, so Harrowhark convinces Gideon that once they win, Gideon can join the royal navy or whatever and never have to go back to the Ninth House. But of course things don’t go according to plan. For one thing, when they get to the planet where the trials are going to take place, there’s only one guide, and “Teacher” is not very helpful.

With eighteen characters all interacting with one another, I got confused in a hurry, especially because every character had two names and a nickname, any of which might be used or not used. Two things helped. One was the list of characters in the beginning, and the second was the fact that they all started dying. The place they’re in to take the test has mysterious keys that open rooms with challenges in them, challenges which require learning new facets of necromantic power. Remember how sci fi books in the mid 20th century would kind of go on and on and on about their sub orbital thrusters and how the anti-gravity field worked? Yeah, this book is kind of like that but for necromantic theory. Eventually the surviving characters figure out how to become Lyctors and also who’s been murdering people.

Many things frustrated me. For example, Harrowhark and Gideon seem to be the only living young people in the Ninth House, and that turns out to be accurate for an important reason, but I thought it was just lazy worldbuilding, especially when they get to the test planet and there weren’t background characters there too. I get that the mood is one of decrepitude, but it also made everything feel like a set piece rather than a real world. Who grows the food? Why do they need a military? If they have space shuttles, why do people fight with swords? Also, Gideon and Harrowhark’s relationship felt unnatural. Gideon spent most of her life, by her own admission, trying to kill Harrowhark out of envy that Harrowhark was loved and Gideon was treated like trash. But their hate for each other felt kind of fabricated. And when Gideon starts to fall in love with Harrowhark, it’s not based on the same kind of lust she feels for the other women. It felt like she went from hating Harrowhark and wanting to avoid her at all costs to blithely volunteering to be tortured so that Harrowhark could get past a puzzle. Their enemies-to-lovers arc felt predictable only in that it was predictable as a trope.

To be fair, there’s a lot going on in this book. There were many characters to keep track of and yet not enough background people to feel like a real place. Too many details to follow along the numerous fight scenes but not enough details to let me feel like I was there with them. This was by no means an easy read, and while I liked the characters, I didn’t feel invested in them enough to pay the cognitive load required to comprehend just what the heck was going on here. I greatly admire the creativity (and vocabulary!) that went into the book, but I am not the right reader for it.



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