A review by aangult
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

adventurous dark funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Incredible.
Killed off all my favourite characters except for one, who just randomly disappeared.


I love sci-fi, and I enjoy me some well throught-through worldbuilding. Admittedly, the worldbuilding here took me a while to grasp, but that’s most of the fun. Plot-wise, I can’t quite pinpoint the moment where everything went to shit
(my guess would be Magnus and Abigail but that seems too easy),
but oh man did it go to shit. I was just too distracted by how delightful the characters were fleshed out from Gideon’s point of view of lacking social expertise, that I failed to notice to how much shit everything went up until maybe
Jeannemary.
At that point I remember thinking that none of these characters except maybe one or two would survive the book
(I knew about Gideon beforehand) and lo and behold— yeah.


Gideon became one of my favourite characters within a couple pages of chapter one.
Which, with the knowledge of how this book ends, turned into an emotional rollercoaster throughout. Or maybe more of an emotional free-fall tower.
I do love them good at heart and self-sacrificial as shit, but good god, nothing could have prepared me for How good and self-sacrificial she would be. 

I enjoyed all the addendums at the end a lot, I love fun little tid-bits and dumb jokes after having just been entirely emotionally destroyed. As soon as this is typed up I’ll scour the internet for the stupidest pieces of fanart I can find. 

Great first book of the year, helped me survive writing my thesis <3
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