Gideon the Ninth

Never have I hated a story that I loved so much.
This was wonderful, frustrating, confusing and a pain in my butt to get through.

It took me a while to figure out why I could not get my head around this book. Then it hit me; too many characters.
Let me clarify, not just too many characters, but that fact that the author did not stick to the same naming convention for each character essentially created 3 times as many names to keep track of.
The fact that there's a cast of character at the very beginning of the book should have been a warning sign, but when you also decide to start calling the characters by their nick names, last names, first names, house position names and descriptive names means that I gave up trying to understand who was talking to who half the time - no, virtually all the time.
This completely ruined any sense of understanding of the intricacies of what I wanted to be a wonderful world.

By half way through this just became an exercise in refusing to not give up. However I was just going through the motions because I refuse to not complete a book.

This saddened me, because when this book was good, it was exceptional. I loved the two main characters. The relationship between them and the witty dialogue was top notch. But I just could not be bothered keeping up with anyone else. I didn't care who died because I couldn't actually place who it was.

The fact that this was a hard slog for me is reflected by the fact that it took me TWO MONHTHS to get through.
That is not a sign of a book that I enjoyed reading.

A shame, because I really should have.