This is a book that’s going to stick with me for a good long while, I think. I loved everything about it. The characters, the setting, the plot. The fact that this is Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel is insane. The fact that she just got a big contract with Tor is hugely exciting.
If you’ve been hanging around /r/Fantasy at all in recent history you’ve heard the buzz about *Gideon*. I’ve even heard it outside of /r/Fantasy, which is a rare thing for me. My boss and one of my best friends, two people who usually ask me to suggest books for *them*, have both been pestering me to read *Gideon* for months.
I don’t want to say too much about the details of the book. I didn’t even read the blurb before I started reading, and I think I was well-served by this. I’ve looked at the blurb since, and I stand by this suggestion. Go in knowing nothing. Literally, the only thing I knew was that it had necromancers.
What I will talk about is the book in a more meta-sense, as well as the characters. Gideon herself might well be one of my favorite characters in any book, ever. I need time to chew on this before I can say that for certain, but she’s certainly a worthy contender. She was raised as a foundling among the death cultists of the Ninth House. She’s never fit in there, and her entire life has been spent training with the sword in the hope of joining the military and getting the hell away from the Ninth. She’s abrasive and foul-mouthed. She’s desperate for love and approval. She tells terrible puns. Everything about her as a character is great.
The other principal character is Harrow, the necromancer daughter of the necromancer Lord and Lady of the Ninth House. She and Gideon do not get along (putting it mildly). Of course they have to team up. It’s great.
What follows (and the reason that I don’t want to go into more detail) is question after question. For the first half of this book, what kept driving to read was the desire to know what the hell was going on. Gideon and Harrow both kept dropping hints about their history, the Ninth House, the universe, and they were so unbelievably tantalizing. And the characters themselves - why do they behave the way they do towards each other? I was determined to find out.
And then - and this is where Muir really was brilliant - what kept driving me forward changed. The questions were still there - in fact she kept piling more on - and I was no less curious. But the tone shifts. The book starts out with a moderately comic tone, thanks largely to Gideon’s internal monologue, but that takes an abrupt turn as the stakes and the tension start rising. I kept thinking of Alien, where the xenomorph kept picking the crew off one by one. Or Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, featuring a group of people stuck on an island with one of their number being a murderer. It was unbelievably heart-pounding.
And the ending … damn.
Around about the 75% mark, I entered a state where I would keep trying to do things, or my wife would ask me to do things, and I’d go “right, I’ve got to do this, real life is important” … and 5 minutes later I’d be stuck in the book again, responding only with vague grunts. Eventually Mrs. OfThePalace recognized that I wasn’t going to be useful for anything whatsoever and told me to stop trying to do anything but read.
Gonna go clear my calendar for tomorrow so I can read Harrow the Ninth properly. Seriously, this was amazing.
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