lighthouse_keeper_ 's review for:

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
3.0
SpoilerThere was a lot to like about Gideon the Ninth, and a lot to dislike.

It suffered from attempting to be funny. Describing a crumbling wall as a "broken-ass wall" in the final boss fight didn't endear me to the narrator, it took me out of the narrative and made me sigh.

It suffered from character bloat. I don't see why there were so many characters, who had so many names and titles. The 1st, 2nd and 8th houses, and Coronabeth, could have been left out and the plot would barely have changed.

It suffered from poor pacing. This is my main issue with the book. Every good scene (and there were several!) was followed by three scenes of characters standing around talking. After the first deaths, we didn't get a frantic search of the property or interrogation of possible suspects, we got people standing around talking about it. After Isaac's death, Jean-Marie's death was as anticlimactic as it gets. The MC wakes up from a nap and she's dead. It was just disappointing. The start of the book felt overly drawn-out (it could have started at act 2 honestly) whilst the last couple of acts felt rushed. This book would have definitely been improved if somebody had forced the author to shorten it by ~15%.

Complaints out of the way, there was also plenty to like.

The characters were all enjoyable and generally well-fleshed-out. I found myself getting attached to side characters (Naberious, Sextus and Camilla, for example) because of the character attributed to them in their few scenes. The scene where Gideon and Babs duelled, he won, she headbutted him, and he got mardy was a great bit of character building.

The writing, where it wasn't trying to be funny, was sometimes lovely. “The house was abandoned, and was breathlessly waiting to be used by somebody other than time.”

The plot was surprisingly coherent. I won't read it again but I think if I had enjoyed it, a second reading would be exciting from the POV of looking for the plot twists before they happened.

Ultimately I think if the book had taken itself a bit more seriously (something I've never said before) and been shorter, this might have been a 4/5 for me. Unfortunately for now it's a 3/5.