Review – Gideon the Ninth

I experienced this book as a revelation.

Before you assume that’s hyperbole, the only other books I’ve ever read where I felt my life had changed in some subtle, indefinable way—that the me before reading was not the same person afterward–were the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake, which I first read in my teens; a series that also happens to be a spiritual ancestor of Gideon the Ninth.

I’m thirty-five. When I was growing up, a queer Chinese kid in deeply white semi-rural Australia, there was no one like me anywhere. Not on the street, not on TV, and not in the books I was reading. And while things are now so much better, and I’m grateful for the smorgasbord of wlw fiction we now get to enjoy, I still struggle to find lesfic books that really resonate with me.

Representation matters.

Gideon the Ninth is the first book where I felt safe. Where I felt seen. Where I could trust the author to only hurt me in all the ways I wanted, and not in the ways I hadn’t agreed to. I had the dreamy sensation that this book was written for someone just like me.

(And oh, how it stings that this is the first time I can say that. And I swear I read a lot of lesfic books, some with protagonists I identify more closely with, but none of them have made me feel this secure before and maybe none of them will in the future, either.)

What is this book even about? I would say:

A snarky, irreverent duellist/bodyguard and her childhood enemy, a necromancer noblewoman, must explore a haunted castle and solve sadistic magic riddles to save their dying House. But not everyone is playing the same game, and failure means a fate worth than death.

At its heart is an intense enemies-from-birth relationship between two sapphic teenagers who were born into a problematic power structure.

That said, this is not a romance novel in the traditional sense. I was waiting and longing for just a bit more emotional maturation so they could finally get to the comfort part of hurt/comfort, but everyone was too busy being complete disaster lesbians. (Which is fine, because trilogy, but I’m just so impatient for it to arrive and slightly scarred from being trained to expect queer-baiting. Which this isn’t, at all; it’s a sloooow burn, but when it burns it’s going to be white-hot.)

But it totally strikes a chord of the all-consuming, heartfelt fragility and beauty of relationships between two sapphic teenage girls, in the same way that the videogame Life is Strange holds that truth at its core.

Everything just worked for me. The sword fights, and the action scenes in general were riveting. I love, love, love warrior/mage odd couples and everything associated with that was so damn satisfying. Also the Gormenghast-like oppressive gothic setting, the magic academy-type puzzles; Gideon, Harrow, Palamedes, Cam; I Loved. Everything. About. This. Book.

The characters.

Gideon is an adorable baby gay who is also a prodigy with a sword, whenever she can stop being distracted by pretty girls long enough to wield it.

Harrowhark is a haunted aristocrat necromancer who’s almost crushed by the weight of her responsibilities. She’s a genius at bone magic, surviving without sleep and getting ahead of her rivals, which includes everyone who isn’t Harrowhark.

Together, they’d be unstoppable, if only they could figure out how to stop fighting each other.

Pros:

• the most adorable baby gay, sword wielding, wisecracking, sunglass-wearing protagonist
• not just one, but many badass rapier-wielding female characters
• all the sword fights

• baby necromancers solving magic puzzles and trying not to die
• a somehow coherent mish-mash of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, murder mystery party and magic academy tropes
• the most epic boss fight ever.

Cons:

I could’ve been happier with a bit more explicitly described racial diversity among the houses. It’s not super clear how diverse the Ninth House is, and they only have a few hundred people left alive. I’d think that Gideon would be a little more attentive to people’s appearances in the other houses, especially since this is the first time she’s been off-planet. It didn’t seem entirely remarked upon; some of (all of?) the Fourth and Second characters were described as brown, but we don’t get much more nuance than that. Yes I’ve since read the tumblr post which has word-of-God confirmation which was great and all but I wanted this in the text somehow. You can see that it wasn’t super obvious by the amount of fanart around that has pale skin tones for Gideon, which is completely understandable because her most often described feature is her shocking (natural) red hair and without careful reading it would usually be safe to assume that a character so described would be white.

Maybe not for you if you don’t like:

• complicated power dynamics between the main characters
• body horror and gore, or the horror genre in general
• lgbt books that aren’t fluffy
• pop culture references in your fantasy/sci-fi novels
• waiting until 2022 when book three comes out.

I can’t promise you’ll have the same divine reaction that I did to this book. I won’t have the same reaction to this book upon re-reading; that kind of path can only be crossed once.

But if you like baby gays—and haunted castles—and death magic—and awesome women wielding swords, you might also like this book.