Gideon the Ninth Review (old, reposted from my Goodreads)

God, what a weird book.

I will frontload the praise -- the core relationship is very good and the slow unpeeling of their mutual hatred and disdain over the course of the story is well handled. The necromancy logic and the great contest that makes up the central plot hook are both excellently threaded together. The mystery gives you just enough to work with where the conclusion makes sense, gives you an incredible re-read, but isn't giving away too much. The prose that's around big, weird dark magics is compelling and captivating.

BUT! That's where the praise ends, because this was a very difficult book to read. Not because it was too dense, but because big, jarring, disrupting speed bumps came every few pages, and none moreso than Gideon herself.

Gideon is a decent character when you start out -- she's horny, messy, complicated, and driven. Her mutual loathing of Harrow is never made explicit, but by the time the plot kicks in you have every reason to get her. However, her dialogue -- and the prose itself, often -- absolutely drips with modern slang and Whedonesque snappiness, painfully so. I was sent out of the book multiple times not just due to her shooting back a one liner akin to 'up yours, grandma!' at a necromancer, but also because she at least three times dropped memes.

I could feel the brakes hitting in my mind when you would flip through a page about the church's heirarchy and beliefs, ornately speaking of the setting, and then run into a line like "lifting the sword with Harrow's, like, three muscles" or someone refer to a "mugshot" in this Warhammer 40k-akin universe. And that happens both in prose and dialogue! I understand this is supposed to make her a reader surrogate and also place her outside of this magical nonsense, but Gideon was *raised on this planet*, and it only makes the book more jarring when she's in a deadly situation and is still talking like Spider-Man.

This was the biggest thing that almost made me put the book down -- especially when I ran into the meme "I studied the blade" spoken aloud by Gid herself -- but by no means the only thing. The tonal whiplash of this thing is *baffling*, carrying all of the former issues and thensome, because at its core Gideon the Ninth is four books inexpertly stitched together. One is a Clue knockoff, one is a 40k novel, one is She-Ra fanfiction, and one is an episode of Buffy.

Each one struggles under the wide variety of things GTN is trying to do. The cast of characters is too big, and not especially memorable, which makes the mystery hard to follow. The core enemies relationship is good but not given enough time, especially when the conclusion happens just as things were starting to get interesting. The grander cosmology of the 40k universe is harmless if light. The Buffy banter and himbo frenemy vs the braniac is too dissonant with the grandoise and import and makes Gideon look writer-dumb instead of character-dumb. And the enemies relationship works, but needed more time to really explore.

All in all, I feel absolutely boggled by the book. It was highly recommended to me and I struggle to understand why. Perhaps the weirdness is part of the charm -- the book is, after all, doing a LOT of things competently, and maybe Gideon's incomprehensibly out of place speech is part of the appeal.

But for me it just feels like a huge missed opportunity. The core relationship is actually really interesting and I found myself clapping excitedly when Harrow finally told her everything. And yet, as I think back on it, my brain remembers oddities -- Why were they in a pool? Was the throwaway line of "we must have a confession in salt water as per tradition" JUST so you could have the scene? Did I really JUST find out about Gideon's guilt *the same act* where people tell her she's wrong AND the same one where Harrow opens up? Was that really the last time Harrow and Gideon talked about their mutual abuse?

I feel like I'm just yelling at nobody even putting this up, because this book is already the talk of the town, has a reportedly great sequel, and won a ton of awards. But I just needed to find SOME way to get out all my thoughts about what how massively frustrating to me GTN was, especially by the time the final conclusion rolls around and instead of feeling like a tragedy, I was left going, "Wait, really? We're just ending it here??"