Gideon the Ninth

If anything, Gideon the Ninth was fun! I genuinely had a lot of fun reading this book and given it's all dark and filled with death and so many skeletons I'm a bit perplexed to admit it true.

There are a few gripes I had with Gideon though. First and foremost: Charles Stross' quote on the cover of my reading “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” is damn misleading. Neither Gideon nor Harrow are confirmed lesbian but their relationship can be seen as entirely platonic. I definitely wouldn't count this as an LGBT book by any means.

My second gripe is the sheer number of characters. There's seventeen characters. They're just not introduced well. For most of them their introduction is quite... swift and then they're mentioned only somewhat rarely. Their names aren't exactly easy to remember too. Then, in some instances, the narration refers to them only as “the Eight” or “the Fourth” or their first/last name and it's a hot mess.

And the third, final gripe of mine is just how much downtime there was. So many pages were empty of dialogue and relegated to bear nothing but tired descriptions that went on for far too long. Even the fight scene at the end was maybe a page or two too long. It never got to the Lord of the Rings levels of almost pointless descriptions but it did make some chapters feel a bit... boring.

The characters, those that stick, were fantastic! Gideon was great but my favorite was Harrow for whatever reason. (I tend to be the caster and Gideon's anything but that.)

Anyway, four stars! Definitely enjoyed reading it. Took my ±9 days to finish and never felt like a chore.