Book Review: Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I finally got around to reading it!

Back in 2019-2020 this book was the only one anyone ever read, by the sounds of it. Everywhere you turned people were talking about Tamsyn Muir and how amazing her scifi-fantasy debut was! And it is! I knew already then that I wanted to read it, and finally I found myself at that spot in my To-Be-Read Pile.

Gideon the Ninth follows the story of – you guessed it! – Gideon, the Ninth. She is so called because she comes from the ninth house, on the ninth planet in Muir’s sci-fi/fantasy universe. And what a universe it is! It’s a dark and dreary world, full of necromancers, skeletons, bones, blood magic, sword fighting and mysterious tombs. Its awesome straight out of the gate!

We follow Gideon as she is tricked into becoming the cavalier of the heir of the Ninth house, the necromancer Harrowhaw Nonagesimus, and they travel to the first house to compete at becoming a lictor for the emperor. Of course, so does a pair of necromancers and cavaliers from all the other planets, the second to the eigth, and thus, our story beings.

Gideon must deal with being a good cavalier (something she isn’t, for reasons I won’t spoil), while also trying to get a long with Harrowhawk to be able to solve the challenges of the first house. Of course – not everything is as it seems.

All in all, I liked the book, I really did, but it still wasn’t without issues. Gideon is a very snarky lady, and I mean very snarky – so much so that at times it becomes exhausting to listen to. And when the narrator half of the time is snarky as well, it often times pulled me out of the story.

Also – I struggled to get the world. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome. It’s dark and terrible and full of skeletal monsters and it’s right up my alley – but they have space ships that seem to quite easily jump between planets, they carry swords and wear skeletal facepaint, yet they have… electric lights and rotating toothbrushes? Is this a sci-fi thing, a dark medieval fantasy thing, or a modern thing? Sure, it can be all those things, but at the same time, I kept getting caught up in understanding the world.

Another thing – and this is not a critique of the book itself – but it’s a horrible book to read as an audibook. Every single character has insane names to begin with, and many of them have as many as three nicknames. Gideon is for example called both Gideon, Griddle, and Nav, for some reason, and it confused me a lot in the beginning. I had to Google the characters multiple times to manage to follow along.

But it’s a cool book, it’s fun and it’s different, and I can understand that it took the world by storm. Personally, I’d love it if it was darker and at times more serious, but that’s probably on me.

As always – I’d love it if you checked out my books! Fast-paced crime and psychological thrills for all!

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