Gideon the Ninth

[lunabee34]

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really, really liked this book.

The protagonist reminds me a lot of Murderbot (if Murderbot were angrier and more foul-mouthed). I would love to see Gideon and Murderbot interact.

I love the world building; there's a part where Gideon thinks a decoration of human teeth is human and beautiful, and I love all those little touches that make the world she inhabits so alien and strange.

I am very much ready for the next book.



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Wow.

This is so damn good. It's very funny and very emotionally affecting and a very good mystery.

I love how much is left unexplained. I still don't understand exactly what the deal is with the Emperor and what he was in danger from all those years ago. Dying to know who the pretty girl in the tomb is. Really want to understand who or what Gideon is; it's hard not to suspect that the note she found actually refers to her or to an ancestor. Who was her mother, and why did she end up in that air shaft? How did she survive the nerve gas? Cytherea says something toward the end that makes me suspect reincarnation is at play (something like "you all never learn even though we do this over and over again" and the way that Gideon is apparently super badass with a sword despite being told over and over again that she's merely mediocre). What happened to Gideon's body and to Cam? I am not discounting that Gideon will come back in a subsequent book. If she can be reunited with her body, Harrow will find a way.

Don't spoil me, but does Harrow the Ninth live up how awesome Gideon the Ninth is?

Comments

[kore]

I actually had a GIANT jangly collection of old cross necklaces I picked up in thrift shops and I tended to wear them ALL at once, like a big noisy breastplate, plus I had triple ear piercings and a bunch of costume jewelry rings my mother had worn in the sixties. (No makeup tho, and my hair has always defied dye and sprays.) And an attitude you could hammer out iron on. Plus I was obsessed with Artaud and Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Camus and a whole lot of other dead French guys with 'tude. And I had supple knee joints and lumbar vertebrae that weren't squashed. //sigh

[lunabee34]

I had a bunch of old jangly crosses that I had hung all over my bedroom like a vampire's lair. IDK why. I thought they were pretty. LOL

[kore]

OMFG, same "aesthetic" thing. I think at that point I was a die-hard atheist! I don't think I had even met another Goth then! And yet, there I was, with my Cure CDs and a video dub of the Crow.