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Book review: Gideon the Ninth
Start with the political world of Dune, only even more decadent, decrepit, and dysfunctional. Add a sprinkle of Hunger Games: each of the eight Great Houses has sent two of its youth to compete for glory and immortality. But there's no rule that only one can survive and win -- in fact, there don't seem to be any rules, and they've been told only to figure it out somehow. What do they have to work with? A millennia-old, decaying castle with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of doors, of which a few are locked. Oh, and all the castle servants are animated skeletons, while one of each pair of contestants is a necromancer and the other a fencer.
Gideon and Harrowhark have grown up together all their late-teenaged lives, the only two children in their House, which is abnormally death-obsessed even by the standards of a civilization ruled by necromancers. Harrowhark is the heir, daughter to the Lord and Lady of the House, while Gideon is an orphaned foundling girl. They hate one another with the fire of a thousand suns: Harrowhark delights in torturing Gideon with magic, while Gideon takes every opportunity to either make trouble, insult people, or run away. As the House has only two available youth, there's not much choice which two to send to the competition. You can see where this is going.
My first impression of the book was "this author really loves describing scenes of decay." How many different words are there to describe things and people that haven't been cleaned or maintained for a thousand years, and were pretty hideous even when new? My first impression wasn't wrong: the loving descriptions of scenes of decay run pretty much throughout the book, even in the parts of the castle that were beautiful a thousand years ago. Sometimes the exposition is painfully obvious: the villain explaining the evil plan to somebody who's about to die, who in turn is keeping the conversation going to buy time, stuff like that. The predictable arc of "total hatred becomes mostly hatred becomes tolerance becomes cooperation becomes friendship" didn't always strike me as believable. But eventually most of the plot makes some kind of sense. A lot of secrets are revealed near the end that have been hinted at throughout, and I hadn't guessed most of them (I'm not much of a mystery reader). There is, apparently, a sequel.
Gideon and Harrowhark have grown up together all their late-teenaged lives, the only two children in their House, which is abnormally death-obsessed even by the standards of a civilization ruled by necromancers. Harrowhark is the heir, daughter to the Lord and Lady of the House, while Gideon is an orphaned foundling girl. They hate one another with the fire of a thousand suns: Harrowhark delights in torturing Gideon with magic, while Gideon takes every opportunity to either make trouble, insult people, or run away. As the House has only two available youth, there's not much choice which two to send to the competition. You can see where this is going.
My first impression of the book was "this author really loves describing scenes of decay." How many different words are there to describe things and people that haven't been cleaned or maintained for a thousand years, and were pretty hideous even when new? My first impression wasn't wrong: the loving descriptions of scenes of decay run pretty much throughout the book, even in the parts of the castle that were beautiful a thousand years ago. Sometimes the exposition is painfully obvious: the villain explaining the evil plan to somebody who's about to die, who in turn is keeping the conversation going to buy time, stuff like that. The predictable arc of "total hatred becomes mostly hatred becomes tolerance becomes cooperation becomes friendship" didn't always strike me as believable. But eventually most of the plot makes some kind of sense. A lot of secrets are revealed near the end that have been hinted at throughout, and I hadn't guessed most of them (I'm not much of a mystery reader). There is, apparently, a sequel.