Gideon the Ninth

I just don't know what to make of this book! The two main protagonists, Harrowhark and, especially, Gideon, were just great. Gideon was a real wise cracker. She had a snappy comeback for almost everything. Her and Harrowhark fought like two sisters for years but finally came together. Their banter was definitely the high point of the story.

This is a story about magic. Magic in space! The Nine houses all live on different planets and travel around by spaceship. The Ninth House is all about necromancy. They get called together, I think to figure out who will become the next Lyctor. What a Lyctor is, I am not sure. In fact, I am not sure what to make of the entire story.

To begin with, I was never too sure who the other characters were. Each house sent their lead magic user and their best cavalier, a sword bearing defender. And each was described in so many different ways, my head was spinning. First names, last names, nicknames, houses, physical descriptions - I just could not keep any of them straight.

And magic! I generally do not like magic in my books, as it is too easy. And not only did the author not bother explaining it (besides the occasional talk of "thanergy"), she just jumped right in and had magic flying all around. Maybe because it was so pervasive, I didn't seem to mind it. They just did all kinds of magical stuff and it seemed to fit.

There were a couple huge battles and I could barely follow the action. Don't get too attached to any of the characters (if you can figure them out), because any of them could go poof. But the story moved along really well and I just plowed on, despite any confusion.

And the writing was great! I do a "Word of the Day" on my Twitter feed when I come across an interesting word in my reading and I haven't done so many entries since Stephenson's [b:The System of the World|116257|The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)|Neal Stephenson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407712273l/116257.SY75.jpg|905463]! There were also plenty of laughs and some real gut punches too.

So despite being confused for most of the book, I was totally entranced as well. Maybe the two are intricately linked? I dunno, but I can't wait to read book two of The Locked Tomb, [b:Harrow the Ninth|39325105|Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)|Tamsyn Muir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1569871560l/39325105.SY75.jpg|60943273].

I've been struggling to think of any way to describe this book and the best I can come up with is that it's something like if the snarky heroine of "Murderbot" found herself a swordfighting human Gene Wolfe's "Shadow of the Torturer" trilogy and then got REALLY involved a necromancy murder mystery (with a little bit of unrequited lesbian crushing on the side).

Not sure if that's helpful.

Anyway, in Tamsyn Muir's very original setting, there is an ancient decaying empire supported by nine Houses, each of which has a helpfully numeric surname and is often just referred to formally as their number (e.g. "Ninth"). Each of the nine houses specialize in a particular type of necromancy - and I'm super impressed at the author for even thinking up the details of nine different types of necromancy. The Emperor - who has been fighting some war, the details of which remain fairly vague - used to have a team of Lyctors supporting him but over the centuries many have been lost. He needs more. A representative team from each of the nine houses are summoned to a crumbling temple on a distant planet where the rest of the book takes place, and where they are expected to figure out how to become Lyctors themselves.

Each team consists of one necromancer and one cavalier (roughly, the magic and the muscle) and the titular Gideon is in this case the cavalier to Harrow, heir to house Nine and kind of a goth asshole. (Apparently ALL of house nine are goth assholes though, so par for the course.) Gideon and Harrow are the only two children surviving their generation; two hundred of their age group died young of a plague of some sort, and House Nine is on the brink of extinction, so Harrow accepts the challenge to become a Lyctor in hopes of saving her House and Gideon is the only option to go with.

As they arrive at the testing site and compete to find and complete the tests themselves, it turns into something of a cross between the Hunger Games and a murder mystery as mysterious deaths start occurring around them. There are many questions unanswered and it takes a while to even start to figure out quite what is going on, as the world Muir has created is so strange and unusual.

This is apparently the first in what is to be a trilogy, the only one published so far at the time I write this, but although the ending leaves it clear that there is more to come, it's not a horrible cliffhanger and does bring this section of the story to a satisfactory (more or less) conclusion.

I don't imagine this book will be everyone's cup of tea, but if the above description sounds interesting to you, you'll probably enjoy it!

4.5 stars. I'm not quite sure how to review this book, so I'll write down some observations.

I loved Gideon. She has a fuck it, fuck them, and when it comes to Harrowhark, fuck you in particular attitude. Both girls hate each other with the power of a thousand suns, but there's also some camaraderie between the two. I really liked the interaction between the two.

This book has about 400 pages, and while I consider myself quite good at English, there were on average two words per page I had to look up. That means I learned about 800 new words (well, I've forgotten most of them already). There were even one or two words even dictionary.com never heard of. Most of them were just archaic English.

The only thing that bothered me was the worldbuilding. There is space travel, spacestations, and an Cohort that does battle on remote worlds, but everyone is dicking around with swords. I saw one memntion of a firearm (but that was a very old one) and artillery shells. So I didn't quite get why swords were the main weapons.

Speaking of old: the author does a wonderful job describing how everything is old, decrepit, dillapidated, rotten, crumbling and falling apart. Everything is on its last legs, but there's still tenthousand year old machines doing their job.

This was a weird book, but I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.
Did anyone catch how the dead girl in the Lost Tomb had some similarities to Gideon? I'm sure we haven't seen the last of her.

Swing and a miss, I’m afraid. This book starts off strong with an intriguing world that is never developed beyond the surface and doesn’t feel like it’s been thought through very well. Characters are all very one note and don’t react to things the way humans would. The plot is nonexistent for a big part of book and then suddenly explodes in a confusing mess. Some random thoughts:

-Snark =/= personality
-Bickering =/= chemistry
-Constant unsubtle teasing of a romance that is just no
-Undeserved redemption of an abuser
-So much telling instead of showing
-MC keeps acting in ways inconsistent with her stated core values
-A character who comments that she’s never even seen someone swim before is able to swim no problem??
-A tantalising mystery set up at the beginning is completely dropped till 3/4 through
-MC talks like a fanfic character from 2012
-Huge life changing events happen with zero emotional reaction from affected characters
-Huge life changing events keep happening off camera
-Frequent mentions of an intrastellar army and battles but there’s never any mention of any other systems they could be at war with. Like there’s one military for all the planets so they can’t be fighting each other and some characters have fought battles so it’s not like it’s idle but no one even seems to be aware of any life on other solar systems
-Such an interesting idea for a world but all the world building goes into aesthetics with no consideration for how it actually works