Wild Necromancer Throwdown

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really liked the last 20 pages. I almost gave this a 4 out of 5.

But it took me 2 months to read because I didn't like the middle. Most of the book, I mean.

The young author is amazing and I'm sure she'll only get better. Her dialogue especially is awesome--razor-sharp. Her imagination is fantastic. Many of the scenes are wonderfully choreographed and beautifully translated into language. So despite my criticisms (below) I give her a lot of credit, and I think I'll get the second book and see if that one doesn't put it all together in a way that makes it more fun to read.

But the middle 300 pages didn't work for me. Or I should say they were hard work and not a pleasure.

Did you ever play Myst? Old-timey video game where you wander around sort of solving puzzles; you turn a dial in one room and schlump across the landscape (it was slow on old machines) to a particular room in another building to see if that opened a door you were having trouble with. Usually, that wasn't it, so you went to look for a knob somewhere else or a switch... It was atmospheric and cool and sometimes mesmerizing but had no rules and no clues and you didn't really know what it was you were trying to do or what you were supposed to be trying to do. It grew tiresome because it felt like a lot of aimless wandering with little progress.

That's how the plot is here. It was Myst set in a giant haunted house. Why were they called there? Nobody knew. What were they supposed to work on? Nobody knew. Were they supposed to team up? Were they supposed to fight? Who was a friend and who was an enemy? Nobody knew. The reader sure doesn't. It becomes clearer in the last 20 or 30 pages, but still feels like I need to go back and re-read to see what I missed to understand what I wasn't getting all along.

I really liked Gideon (though she would be hard to know in real life) and grew to like Harrow, though their enmity and mutual unkindness became tiresome. Nobody was on anybody's side for the longest time, and that takes a lot of joy out of reading for me. They were interesting and complex and clever, though.

The world-building is impressive in a way, but details are doled out so slowly and so ambiguously that it really contributed to my frustration through the middle 80% or so. How the worlds work or how the empire works is almost unexplained. What the stakes are that they're competing for is only implied. The context is vague at best.

The setting for most of the novel is a giant building with lots of Myst-like puzzles that don't seem to have any purpose. The characters win keys to open locked rooms--that also seem to have no purpose. Even at the end I can't say quite what they accomplished. But it's clearly all defined and planned in the writer's head. Most of what I understand now comes from the end matter, so that's kind of cheating; I would have preferred to find it in the story.

Anyway... Some folks will rightly love this. I'm envious of the author's prose skill, for one thing, and I dug the end. But it tried my patience too much for me to rave about it like others have. Maybe book 2 will work for me better.

Recommended for most fantasy and SF readers but with all the caveats listed above. :)

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