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princehal 's review for:
Gideon the Ninth
by Tamsyn Muir
after briefly skimming some reviews, it seems clear that this is a book you either love or hate. what is clearer: your enjoyment of the book will depend vastly on how you react to gideon and her weird, eccentric brand of humour and narrative. i usually have very little patience for Quirky and/or Quippy narrative voices and i was fully bracing myself to find gideon grating.
i could not have been more wrong.
a narrative voice that is funny and soulful and genuinely, absurdly likeable despite an anachronistic sense of humour? check. a large cast of characters who are weird and enigmatic and absurdly interesting once you get to recognise their names? check. necromancy???? check! one of the more interesting and unnerving and intense and heart-pulping relationship dynamics i've read recently in gideon and harrow? 100% check.
actually, i find myself disagreeing so vehemently with a lot of negative reviews here which goes to show how much i enjoyed this book. maybe it is because i don't read much sci-fi, but i was more than happy to read the book without understanding the minutiae of the world and its mechanisms; quite a few of the characters had sketched motivations at best but i found that more than enough to satisfy my imagination; it didn't bother me in the slightest that there wasn't a load of Up Front action because i found gideon's interactions with people and her explorations and her strange tensions with harrow to be profoundly compelling.
muir's prose is excellent. her action scenes are impressively vivid (i found myself thinking throughout what a good video game this would make). it was a bit twist-y for my tastes but there were several moments where i was genuinely startled & one ill-fated trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night while reading about a terrible bone construct that made me very uneasy. and, i mean, 'terrible bone construct' alone should convince you to read this. the things muir does with skeletons!
i need everyone i know to read this book!! i am desperate to dissect it!
i could not have been more wrong.
a narrative voice that is funny and soulful and genuinely, absurdly likeable despite an anachronistic sense of humour? check. a large cast of characters who are weird and enigmatic and absurdly interesting once you get to recognise their names? check. necromancy???? check! one of the more interesting and unnerving and intense and heart-pulping relationship dynamics i've read recently in gideon and harrow? 100% check.
actually, i find myself disagreeing so vehemently with a lot of negative reviews here which goes to show how much i enjoyed this book. maybe it is because i don't read much sci-fi, but i was more than happy to read the book without understanding the minutiae of the world and its mechanisms; quite a few of the characters had sketched motivations at best but i found that more than enough to satisfy my imagination; it didn't bother me in the slightest that there wasn't a load of Up Front action because i found gideon's interactions with people and her explorations and her strange tensions with harrow to be profoundly compelling.
muir's prose is excellent. her action scenes are impressively vivid (i found myself thinking throughout what a good video game this would make). it was a bit twist-y for my tastes but there were several moments where i was genuinely startled & one ill-fated trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night while reading about a terrible bone construct that made me very uneasy. and, i mean, 'terrible bone construct' alone should convince you to read this. the things muir does with skeletons!
i need everyone i know to read this book!! i am desperate to dissect it!