WardenRed reviewed Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb, #1)
None
5 stars
I've lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.
For me, there's always a certain pressure in reading a super hyped book you've been hearing so much about for months and you know half your friends are in love with. Because—what if I don't like it? There's no real harm in not liking a book everyone else loves, of course. Tastes differ! Except it's a little like standing on the edge of a party, watching everyone having fun without you, wondering why you came.
So, yeah. I was a bit apprehensive when I began reading Gideon the Ninth. Even more so when the first chapter failed to catch my interest. It was just... stuff happening. Fun stuff, mostly, but it didn't really grab me or gave me …
I've lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.
For me, there's always a certain pressure in reading a super hyped book you've been hearing so much about for months and you know half your friends are in love with. Because—what if I don't like it? There's no real harm in not liking a book everyone else loves, of course. Tastes differ! Except it's a little like standing on the edge of a party, watching everyone having fun without you, wondering why you came.
So, yeah. I was a bit apprehensive when I began reading Gideon the Ninth. Even more so when the first chapter failed to catch my interest. It was just... stuff happening. Fun stuff, mostly, but it didn't really grab me or gave me solid reasons to care. It wasn't until about chapter 5 that I grasped what exactly was going on and realized the book actually had all the makings of the type of story I usually love. It only got better from there: moderately complex politics, a lot of interesting characters, an incredible magic system, a closed confinement murder mystery, snappy prose with lots of cool similes, a complicated enemies-to-allies-to-more relationship at the center of it all... and I still wasn't exactly hooked. Honestly, it was weird, sitting there reading a book that had all the components of a stellar read, but they never quite clicked together for me. Was it me, or was it the novel?
Then, when I was at least 3/4 in and Harrowhark was opening up in a flood about certain things that hurt, I got it. It wasn't me, and it wasn't the book. It was the main character. Gideon's fun, fierce, snarky, and provides a good set of eyes to experience the plot through, make no mistake. It's just that she wasn't particularly interesting to me. She's the type of character I used to enjoy a lot some years ago, and to deliberately seek out, and then I guess I got a little tired of the type. I didn't really want to experience the setting or the plot through her eyes. Harrow, though? I totally wanted to know more about Harrow, even back when Gideon still loathed her wholeheartedly and kept doing things in Harrow's absence.
When I got it, in that super Harrow-centric moment that is my favorite part of the whole book except maybe the epilogue, I looked back at what I read, reassessed it through a more Harrow-centric lens, and read on with much more enjoyment, low-key pretending Harrow was the MC. That made the rest of the book so much more engrossing, and it made the ending hurt so much more.
The second book in this series is called Harrow the Ninth and that alone makes me want to read it as soon as possible. Give me more of my broken necromancer. I think it's gonna hurt, but that's to be expected.
Read for the following September 2020 readathons:
- I Read Sins Not Tragedies: First in series
- Demonathon: Featuring the Dead
- CoffeeReadathon: Hyped Book
- Monsterthon: Recced by a Friend
- Mythothon3: Featuring a Rivalry