Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth⚔️ by Tamsyn Muir 💀

I want to be fair to this book — the first half of it or so was very intriguing. I enjoyed the world building and the introduction of necromancy and Gideon is a great protagonist to follow. She’s snarky and spunky but isn’t entirely closed off to learning more about the world her. Her changing perspective throughout the story was one of the highlights for me!

Where it started to fall flat for me was in the second act, and most of the third. There was firstly this very awkward meandering period where it felt like the plot and character development stalled for a hot minute. Then, I quickly realized that there were so many different plot points starting with very little being told to the audience — something that I’m normally down for, but with an entirely new world and magic system to learn about, a dozen or so new characters each with their own unique system to follow, conspiracies and secrets that aren’t revealed until way too late imo, and plots starting and stopping and jerking left and right at every turn, I actually found this book very hard to follow. Unfortunately a lot of the growing relationship moments or emotional moments shared between Harrow and Gideon felt rushed to me too, to the point where >! I felt like their claims of undying admiration for one another felt unjustified. Like, we start out with them hating each other, and then there’s these few moments of genuine connection which I liked, only for Harrow to shut Gideon out again essentially until the end. Kinda stops the progression in its tracks, yk? !<

While the ending was intriguing and I liked the final battle. and I think I could continue the series if I found Harrow the Ninth for cheap or free on Spotify audio or something, I’m not super compelled to read on. It’s sad — I really wanted to enjoy this book but I couldn’t find it in me. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ I think they either needed to make this book double the length (or at least 100-200 pages longer) to really flesh out these ideas, or keep it the same length and strip these ideas down to one or two main focusses.

A lot of people enjoyed the heck out of this book 😭 I’m wondering if I missed something… let me know your thoughts!

(PS: if you liked this book, you’d probably LOVE Brandon Sanderson, such as his Mistborn trilogy. It has the same scale of world building and magic system with way more detail and time given to flesh out the world and characters. They’re about double the length if not more, but still!)