It was a glorious, hot mess of a book from a storytelling perspective.
I’ve even seen it mentioned in some mainstream news outlets. This book has gotten a lot of word of mouth around the web. I’m writing this review as an author critiquing another author’s book, in an attempt to improve my own writing. And Gideon is a smart, foul-mouthed, queer swordfighter with a skull painted on her face, and the inside-her-brain POV that Muir has chosen here means we get full access to every panting, furious, childish, bloodthirsty and impure thought that crosses Gideon's mind - which is fantastic, because I wanted to be her best friend by the end of the first page anyway, and everything that came after was just candy.Spoilers Below! You’ve been warned.
Except here, Harrow is the black-gowned, black-cloaked, black-hooded daughter of the Ninth House rulers, a powerful bone magician who sweats blood and can kill you with a flick of her wrist. And Gideon would be the wrong-side-of-the-tracks bad boy who loves her and hates her in vastly unequal amounts. If this were a cheesy 80's teen sex comedy (which, in some ways, it kinda is), Harrow would be the icy, blonde rich girl with the big house and perfect clothes. It is altogether its own thing.īut Muir uses the claustrophobia and narrowed focus to fine purpose, concentrating the action around a series of increasingly torturous tests (which serve both to hook the plot along and give some baseline explanations for the entwined science, religion and necromantic magic on which her universe depends) and the relationships that develop between the limited cast of characters - particularly Gideon and Harrow. 'Gideon the Ninth' is too funny to be horror, too gooey to be science fiction, has too many spaceships and autodoors to be fantasy, and has far more bloody dismemberings than your average parlor romance. Gideon Nav - orphaned girl, ward of the Ninth House, smart and mean and bad-ass from shades to bones - lives in that line. All the weird, all the violence, all the rebellious snark and darkness live in that one line. The opening line of Tamsyn Muir's debut novel, Gideon the Ninth, is, in effect, a primal distillation of everything that comes after. No, it's a line that lurks a little bit further back in the pack that mocks its betters under its breath and slinks right into your brain to let you know exactly what you're in for. It can't compete with punchier, pithier, more highly polished openers, but who would want to? That isn't a front-row line. It's not at the top because it's a little weird, a little long, a little clunky and oddly punctuated. In the Eternal Record of great opening lines, that one is. In the myriadic year of our lord - the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! - Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.
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