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rsadelleI had heard about Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, so I was pleased when my sci fi book club read it this summer. The selling point you hear about it is "lesbian necromancers in space." First of all, only one of the main two characters is a necromancer. Secondly, the fact that they're in space is completely irrelevant to the plot. A better framing is: "lesbian warrior and lesbian necromancer in a spooky isolated building where people start dying." Once I figured out that the story was essentially a possibly supernatural country house murder mystery, then it started to make more sense. Not a huge amount of sense - there is a lot about the book that doesn't make sense until you get to the end, and the appendices past that - but at least I understood the basics of what was going on. Also, once you figure out people are just going to keep dying, you can stop worrying so much about their names, which is nice because everyone has several names and they're hard to keep straight. I mentioned that when my mom and I were talking about it at a virtual family lunch, and my dad said, "Like the baking show" (my whole family watches GBBO now).
At the very end of the book, when Gideon figures out what to do, I was surprised that she went forward onto the spikes instead of backward off the cliff. Then I shook my head and thought, "Duh, necromancers. Harrow needs her body, of course she couldn't disappear off the cliff." But it was weird that I thought that, until I realized that I was thinking of this Obi-Wan/Darth Maul story (a spin-off of the Sith Academy series), which is also why I wasn't surprised when the follow-up was Gideon in Harrow's head.
Once Harrow the Ninth came out, I put in a hold on that and got to read it several weeks later. If Gideon was confusing, Harrow was absolutely baffling. At no point did I have any idea what was happening. I was even wrong about the one thing I thought I knew (I was sure Harrow had found a way to put Gideon in the sword). Possibly the best thing about it was that it answered the biggest unanswered question from the first book, namely: what made Gideon able to see the necromancy in the constructs in the tests? The answer is that she is God's daughter, which I liked in that it makes her a Christ figure and you very rarely see female Christ figures.
I'm invested enough now to read the third book, but unless it's absolutely amazing, I probably wouldn't read more of Tamsyn Muir's work. I do recommend reading the books as ebooks, because then you can easily satisfy your curiosity about the meaning of the eighty bajillion death-related words by clicking on them for a definition. I genuinely thought I had a very broad vocabulary, and yet apparently I do not, at least when it comes to death.
At the very end of the book, when Gideon figures out what to do, I was surprised that she went forward onto the spikes instead of backward off the cliff. Then I shook my head and thought, "Duh, necromancers. Harrow needs her body, of course she couldn't disappear off the cliff." But it was weird that I thought that, until I realized that I was thinking of this Obi-Wan/Darth Maul story (a spin-off of the Sith Academy series), which is also why I wasn't surprised when the follow-up was Gideon in Harrow's head.
Once Harrow the Ninth came out, I put in a hold on that and got to read it several weeks later. If Gideon was confusing, Harrow was absolutely baffling. At no point did I have any idea what was happening. I was even wrong about the one thing I thought I knew (I was sure Harrow had found a way to put Gideon in the sword). Possibly the best thing about it was that it answered the biggest unanswered question from the first book, namely: what made Gideon able to see the necromancy in the constructs in the tests? The answer is that she is God's daughter, which I liked in that it makes her a Christ figure and you very rarely see female Christ figures.
I'm invested enough now to read the third book, but unless it's absolutely amazing, I probably wouldn't read more of Tamsyn Muir's work. I do recommend reading the books as ebooks, because then you can easily satisfy your curiosity about the meaning of the eighty bajillion death-related words by clicking on them for a definition. I genuinely thought I had a very broad vocabulary, and yet apparently I do not, at least when it comes to death.