The thing people always say as a way to pitch Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Miur is that it's "lesbian necromancers in space." I get it. I understand why they say that. It's accurate, it's succinct, it's catchy, it's fun to say. But that set my expectations for the book at one place (a fun, gay, adventure with space magic) but the book ended up being something pretty different (a murder-mystery that is almost wholly medieval fantasy).
So let's start at the first part of that pitch: lesbians. Yes, the book does have lesbians in it. Like I said: an accurate description. But the book is not nearly as gay as I had been hoping it would be. Part of that is just my general hopes for a book when it's pitched as being queer and part of that is from all of the extremely gay fanart I've seen on twitter over the past several months. But regardless, the book has very little actual romantic content in it. There's the suggestion that maybe there's something between Gideon and Dulcinea and I think that does result in some interesting internal monologues from Gideon as she wrestles with those feelings and how they somewhat-but-not-quite conflict with her orders from Harrow.
Then there's Gideon and Harrow. The book tries to have an enemies-to-lovers sort of vibe to them but by the end I felt like they were barely friends. Sure, they had warmed up to each other. And, yes, they no longer wanted to actively kill each other. But a lot of that felt like it was more due to the circumstances they were in than anything going on between them. The fact that the book has very little interiority from Harrow certainly didn't help at all. Any change in emotions would've had to have been perceived by Gideon but Harrow is so absent for such large chunks of the book that it hardly ever got the chance for that up until she suddenly pulls Gideon into a pool and tells her all her most important secrets.
Onto the second part of the pitch: necromancers. I have no qualms with this part. Necromancy is cool. I played a necromancer in Diablo 2 and have loved the idea of it ever since. Also, just in general, I feel like it's an underrepresented school of magic in media. And usually when you do get necromancy, it's almost always old evil liches who are trying to destroy the world or whatever. But in this book, it seems like necromancy is the only sort of magic there is and I'm totally okay with that. All the magic stuff in this book kinda rules, honestly.
And the final part: "in space." This is possibly the part that bugs me the most. Broadly speaking, I prefer sci-fi over fantasy so having a book that effectively mixes the two is a nice treat, not to mention a relative rarity. I was ready for a sci-fi adventure with magical flair to it and what I got instead was something that technically does take place in space and technically has sci-fi elements, it is almost entirely irrelevant to the story. There is a bit of suggestion about what the universe is like and the level of technology they have available to them but it's not really explored and barely even comes up. For example, the nine houses all live on different planets and so they have to use space shuttles to travel to see one another. But the thing is, the shuttles they have are leftovers from some sort of civilization or society that came before them and so while they have these shuttles and have figured out how to operate them, they don't have the ability to produce more and they don't seem to have any sort of exact knowledge about how it all works. Which is extremely interesting to me and is just not at all explored in the book even a little bit.
My issues with the space shuttles don't stop there, though. The main thrust of the book is that Harrow, Gideon, and representatives from houses two-through-eight have all been invited to the Canaan House in order to take some sort of test to become lyctors. So everyone needs to take space shuttles to get to the Canaan House because it's on a wholly separate planet from everyone else. Ok, sure, makes sense so far. And then when everyone arrives, the shuttles are promptly dumped into the ocean. An intriguing turn of events and it's obviously signalling that something is going on even if the reader doesn't know what quite yet. Then it's reveal that the book is actually a murder-mystery as Gideon and Harrow have to try and figure out not just how to become a Lyctor but also who keeps killing the other candidates. So when you get to that point in the book, it suddenly hit me why this is set in space at all: being on a separate planet with no way on or off and no means of communication effectively cuts everyone off from the outside world and so your murder-mystery is entirely contained within this mansion and is perpetrated entirely by someone you've already met. And that was about when I realized that, oh, this book is never going to be the sci-fi/fantasy mix I had hoped for and that the "in space" part is entirely there to support the murder-mystery plot that no one ever mentions or talks about.
This conveniently leads into one of my other issues with the book and this one is, I think, a much bigger one. Although, I should preface this by saying that I'm not huge on murder-mystery stories. I don't particularly like or dislike them; I'm largely ambivalent to them. They're fun from time to time but I don't seek them out. So I'm not an expert on them at all but I'm going to do my best to describe the issue I had with this one.
To me, one of the main attractions of a murder-mystery is that it is up to you, the reader, to try and solve the mystery along with the protagonist(s) of the book. The book slowly feeds you and the characters more clues and information and maybe you solve it before the characters do or vice-versa, but either way that's the general framework of the book. But in Gideon the Ninth, the mystery is literally unsolvable until the book reveals the solution to you. Because of the information it gives you and what you know about the world, it was completely impossible to make any sort of reasonable deduction about what is going on. Because of the set-up with the shuttles being dumped in the ocean, you're led to believe that the people on this planet are the only ones here. And, yes, technically they are. But one of those shuttles had a stowaway (or an extra passenger? It's unclear) who killed the intended participant and took her place. So the book presents you with information that it is lying about and you really have no solid reason as to why you wouldn't believe the book. It's not like it's an unreliable narrator. The book is just keeping secrets from you in order to preserve the mystery. If you had known at the start that Dulcinea wasn't actually Dulcinea, then there'd be no mystery to solve. But by not knowing that, the mystery is impossible to solve. So when I got to the end of the book, it felt like the story had just pulled a fast one on me. It didn't matter that I had tried to figure it out. It didn't matter that Gideon and Harrow tried to figure it out. It left that entire aspect of the plot completely unsatisfying to me.
But wait, there's more! Because there's another aspect of the ending that I found profoundly disappointing and that was Gideon dies at the end. She was the single most likable character and in what I felt was a pretty underwhelming final confrontation, she dies pretty unceremoniously. But what comes after that feels like it exists almost purely to set up Gideon being brought back to life in the next book. I haven't read it yet but I have a hard time believing that it'd be anything else. I don't think you'd put the character's name in the title of the first book if she died and wasn't in the rest of the trilogy.
One last more specific thing about the ending is who exactly it was impersonating Dulcinea. Only a chapter or two before the reveal is when Harrow tells Gideon all the secrets of the Ninth house and talks about the girl in The Locked Tomb. In the moment, I wasn't sure if the Dulcinea impersonator was supposed to be that specific girl or if Harrow talking about all that was just to seed things for the next book(s). It made me wonder if I had missed some important detail or needed to go back and reread something. It almost felt haphazardly assembled, like the Locked Tomb information had been squeezed in later on to make sure we had that information implanted now instead of getting squeezed in later when it would be more blatant that it'd be relevant.
So those are my main issues with the book. I have a few more thoughts that feel much more nit-picky and are, to various degrees, a matter of personal taste so I'll get into those next.
The first thing is that the way Gideon talks feels completely out of step with the rest of the cast of characters. Everyone else in the book is talking like a character in a medieval fantasy novel whereas Gideon talks like she enjoys shitposting on Twitter. It's absolutely bizarre. I think that this could have been used as a way to point out how Gideon pretty much comes from a different societal class from everyone else. All the Necromancers and Cavalier are all the upper crust of society, born into wealthy or powerful houses, who have trained their whole lives for moments like this. Whereas Gideon is just someone that the Ninth house took in and raised. She was never supposed to have this job. The book does get into this a little bit, mostly by way of Gideon griping about all the things she's supposed do and say as a cavalier that she really doesn't want to but the way she talks, her speech affectations, and her seemingly completely different vocabulary is never once a part of that. So while it could have been that, it never feels like it was. It makes it feel like it was put in just to make her relatable and easily likable. Maybe that's a bit cynical but it's hard for me to see it any other way.
Another thing, and I understand this one is a much more personal thing, is that the book introduces a lot of characters all at once. Once Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the book introduces pretty much all the other characters in one go. Two characters per house, for seven houses (plus one more because one house sent three), plus one more (Teacher, who is in charge of everything at Canaan House). That's sixteen characters all over the course of a couple of pages. It introduces them with their full name: a first name, a last name, and a house number. Gideon Nav the Ninth. Harrowhark Nonagesimus the Ninth. And so on and so on for fifteen more people. And then the book never uses their full names again, opting to only use the first, the last, or the number, but never a combination of the three. So I had an extremely hard time keeping track of who was who or what anyone looked like or was supposed to act like. This problem gets compounded because after everyone is introduced, most of them disappear for seventy or so pages while it focused on Gideon talking to Harrow, Dulcinea and Teacher. So when the book got around to killing people off, it'd mention who the dead body was and I wouldn't have any clue who it was talking about. So a character dies and while, yes, that probably shouldn't be happening here, I felt like I had no idea what the actual impact of that death was. And then it just kept happening. By the end of the book I finally started to get a feel for maybe three or four of the characters because they were the only ones still alive and were present for the main plot for multiple chapters in a row.
So that's about it. If you've read this far then you might think I disliked this book or maybe even hated it but I didn't. It's alright. It's a fun enough story and Gideon is a fun character to follow through the events of the book. It's pretty good. I gave it a three out of five. The second book in the series is on my list of books to read in the near future and, unless something goes terribly wrong in that one, I'll pick up the third book as well (whenever that comes out, it was recently pushed back to 2022). I'm genuinely looking forward to reading them but I finished Gideon the Ninth over a week ago and have had all these thoughts bouncing around in my head that I desperately needed to get them out.
Thanks for reading.