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A review by anna4ce
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
1.0
Seriously, how did anyone get past the writing "style" of this book? Or did every other type-A personality just DNF and not write a review?
So, I love reading and I know a lot of words. I felt that this author purposefully choose obscure words for no other purpose than to show off that she does, in fact, know obscure words. Rather than adding dimension or any useful purpose to the plot, the sheer volume of these words was overwhelming and served nothing more than to continuously RIP me from the storyline and any pretense of trying to enjoy this hugely talked about book.
Of course, there are some words that I could glean meaning from the surrounding text, but being type-A, I looked them up to see if they added any literary quality to the writing: big fucking nope.
For instance, this phrase: "You're parents," he said, in his unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice... As a refresher, I looked up sonorous and it is defined as deep and full so essentially Muir wrote: "...he said, in his unexpectedly deep and full and deep voice..." That seems redundant...and dumb. Why not just write sonorous?
Other words I found excessively pretentious: cozen, bockety, prolix, abstruse, gentian, higt (yup, that's a real word and not spelled incorrectly), trig, cambric, cavil, targe, simulacrum, calcaneus, mountebank, ambo, and others.
Words I appreciated knowing because I thought they did add something "extra" to the story: orison, benighted, hierophant, ascetic, susurrus, etiolated, morass, coterminous, sophist and lahar.
And of course, there were other words that I recognized from high school vocab tests (temerity, prevarication, recalcitrant, and others) that I was a bit fuzzy on defining so looked up anyways.
So...yeah...I spent so much time looking up words and then tracking them because fuck, if I'm going to spend time looking them up, I'm at least going to write them down so I can back up my reasons for saying this book sucked.
The storyline in and of itself: Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space? Meh. Lesbians? Okay...maybe? I don't know, it's a really weak character description. There's no romance at all, just...angst? Sexuality doesn't play into this story so gay or straight, it changes nothing to the story. Necromancers? Haunted gothic palace? More like, haunted ruins of a palace and EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS "MOULDING". Yes, I fucking get it. It's 10,000 years old and I don't need to read "mould" all the damn time. Set in space? Yeah, much like any book that takes place on Earth is also IN SPACE. Seriously, "outer space" was mentioned like, twice. Space is NOT a descriptor of this book.
Maybe this would have been a 2 or 3 star book, but because of the pretentious writing, this is a hard pass for the rest of this trilogy.
So, I love reading and I know a lot of words. I felt that this author purposefully choose obscure words for no other purpose than to show off that she does, in fact, know obscure words. Rather than adding dimension or any useful purpose to the plot, the sheer volume of these words was overwhelming and served nothing more than to continuously RIP me from the storyline and any pretense of trying to enjoy this hugely talked about book.
Of course, there are some words that I could glean meaning from the surrounding text, but being type-A, I looked them up to see if they added any literary quality to the writing: big fucking nope.
For instance, this phrase: "You're parents," he said, in his unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice... As a refresher, I looked up sonorous and it is defined as deep and full so essentially Muir wrote: "...he said, in his unexpectedly deep and full and deep voice..." That seems redundant...and dumb. Why not just write sonorous?
Other words I found excessively pretentious: cozen, bockety, prolix, abstruse, gentian, higt (yup, that's a real word and not spelled incorrectly), trig, cambric, cavil, targe, simulacrum, calcaneus, mountebank, ambo, and others.
Words I appreciated knowing because I thought they did add something "extra" to the story: orison, benighted, hierophant, ascetic, susurrus, etiolated, morass, coterminous, sophist and lahar.
And of course, there were other words that I recognized from high school vocab tests (temerity, prevarication, recalcitrant, and others) that I was a bit fuzzy on defining so looked up anyways.
So...yeah...I spent so much time looking up words and then tracking them because fuck, if I'm going to spend time looking them up, I'm at least going to write them down so I can back up my reasons for saying this book sucked.
The storyline in and of itself: Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space? Meh. Lesbians? Okay...maybe? I don't know, it's a really weak character description. There's no romance at all, just...angst? Sexuality doesn't play into this story so gay or straight, it changes nothing to the story. Necromancers? Haunted gothic palace? More like, haunted ruins of a palace and EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS "MOULDING". Yes, I fucking get it. It's 10,000 years old and I don't need to read "mould" all the damn time. Set in space? Yeah, much like any book that takes place on Earth is also IN SPACE. Seriously, "outer space" was mentioned like, twice. Space is NOT a descriptor of this book.
Maybe this would have been a 2 or 3 star book, but because of the pretentious writing, this is a hard pass for the rest of this trilogy.