Gideon the Ninth

Ah, Gideon the Ninth. What a book. I originally picked this book up a year ago, and made it to the end of Part 3, decided I was going to back to it eventually, and then proceeded to forget to do that. Which is heartbreaking, considering the fact that now that I've read it, it's one of my favourite books.

Tamsyn Muir has crafted one of the most interesting SFF universes that I've experienced in recent memory, and I'm ungodly excited to see more of it down the line. It feels like she was a massive fan of 40k, who decided she wanted an ending to the mythos, so she made her own universe that was similar to it, yet distinct enough to not be a direct rip. She then proceeded to make it gay as shit.

And hoo boy, does this book slap. Spoilers for the rest of this review, I have nothing bad to say about this book. I loved every single facet of it, every character, every line, and if I could go back to not remembering it so that I could have the joy of experiencing it for the first time again, I would.

First things first, Gideon, our protagonist, is probably one of my favourite fantasy protagonists ever put to page. I don't think any author has managed to make the reader understand a PoV character as quickly as Tamsyn does here, because by the end of the first chapter, the reader will have a near perfect understanding of who Gideon is. But by no means is Gideon a shallow character. Quite the opposite actually. Without getting too deep into spoilers, there are truths about herself that Gideon isn't quite ready to admit to herself, and watching her unravel herself from her traumatic childhood is a genuinely beautiful story.

And then there's Harrow. Oh Harrow, my beloved. A character designed for you to loathe, and then love. The smartest woman in any given room, who shows just how stupid she is by ignoring the asset she has in Gideon. Again, I don't want to spoil anything, because you should read the book, but her and Gideon's animosity towards each other is such an entertaining dynamic because of how different the two of them are to each other.

The prose is beautiful in the book, and challenged me quite a bit at points, throwing words at me that I'd never even heard, let alone read, before, so it was quite fun having my vocabulary expanded like that.

The world is probably my favourite aspect of the book. Having the universe be set in our solar system, but so far into the future that the names of the planets as we know them have been lost, is an amazing touch, that adds a surprising amount of weight to the story.

The magic system within the world is also really cool, as there's multiple different forms of necromancy within the universe. For instance, one of the houses style of necromancy comes in the form of freezing the person's aging, allowing people to live forever. Some of the cooler aspects of the magic system are massive spoilers, so I won't go too deep into those, but needless to say, it's fantastic.

But let's get to my one issue. My big, glaring, issue. And that is that Tamsyn Muir has refused to apologize for the sheer agony that the ending of this book put me through. I bawled my fucking eyes out. I don't think I will ever emotionally recover from the beating my heart took from the last 20 pages of this book, so I will be pursuing legal action. It was absolutely fantastic, I couldn't have asked for a better ending.

All in all, read the book, you're doing yourself a massive disservice by not at least experiencing the first in the series, because it really is an absolute treat. If you couldn't tell from the rest of the review, this is a 5 star book, and I'll be recommending it to anyone who'll listen to me.