Sophia's Reviews > Gideon the Ninth

Someone is going to make this into a movie and that someone will make a lot of money. 3.5 stars, rounding up for kicks. The book starts slow, dense and annoying but picks up steam and generally improves a lot as the story progresses. I had a pretty tough time keeping the characters straight. It has one of the best book endings I have ever read.

My greatest frustration with the book stems from a lack of explanation of how necromancy works in the book’s world. Gideon is essentially a bodyguard for a necromancer, and as readers we follow her thoughts and reactions through most of the book. Because we see the world through her perspective and she is not a necromancer, as a reader we often have no way of understanding what we are seeing (whenever Gideon doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, which is fairly often). While I sometimes appreciate when authors use this immersion tactic, this book is more of a whodunit mystery than anything else, and sometimes we as readers do not have as much information as the characters we are watching solve the mystery. I felt pretty annoyed watching characters connect dots that I felt I had no way of reasonably connecting with the information I had. I’m having a hard time describing what I mean without spoiling anything, but I kind of felt like Sherlock emerged at the end and pointed to all the clues I was never shown.