Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Series, 1)

I wanted to love this book. I truly did. It had such great reviews and hype about it. The cover is awesome. The blurbs are enticing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for me. Do not get me wrong, I love sci-fi, I love space, action, death, otherworldly Gothic world building, lesbians with great big swords – all of it. It’s just that this book did not live up to its claims. I’d hardly call the characters lesbians, well, they might have been, or they might have been a couple of young women exploring the vague notion of angsty Victorian female romantic friendship, so caught up in each other for their owns sakes that everyone else is meaningless to them - while coming across as hating each other. There wasn’t much space either. Aside from getting on a shuttle to go to another planet for a few pages and then ending up on some other thing floating about the heavens for another couple of pages at the end of the book, there is rarely any space at all. Gothic Palace – whatever it was, it might have been a palace. But what is described is a crumbling, relic of something that has various sections, some appear grand, others have come out of a 20th Century science laboratory or the art sketches for the video game Dead Space. In fact, a lot of the action sequences in the book reminded me of the OTT violence and gouts of blood and guts that fly around in those kinds of video games. Maybe that’s what the author was aiming for, I’m not sure, but it didn’t work for me in novel format. Dead Space is a great game BTW. This book also tried to be funny. It was a dark humour, given the subject matter. And I guess it worked, if you can suspend disbelief enough to think people crack jokes and make quirky hand gestures and facial expressions while desperately fighting for their lives against amassed necromantic nastiness. Fair enough, we are supposed to suspend disbelief and imagine necromancers, reanimated skeletons, evil Lords, soul siphoning, serious people really wanting to seriously hurt others, traveling in space etc is real – that isn’t hard, but for me it didn’t mix well with quirky humour. I got over it very quickly. There were many eye rolling moments – oh, her arm has withered, eyes fallen out, guts dangling by a thread being dragged 20 foot along a threadbare carpet and she still can crack a joke with a wink? That kind of eye rolling – awesome. It took me a good while to get into the book. It felt like nothing useful happened for the first 150 pages aside from getting on a shuttle and going to another planet. We could have started on the planet and not lost much. It got a little more exciting about 200 pages in. But then it devolved into a quite convoluted very hectic fight fest with people dropping dead all over the place. When I got to this part, it reminded me of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None – a far less in your face cr...

The thing it does that I cannot bear is that the third person narrative bits switch between Fancy Gothic Fantasy Prose and Extremely Informal Goofs - to paraphrase a couple of pages i read earlier before having to quit forever, "Ever the intrepid scholar, she perused the great dark libraries at length, discovering ancient horrors.... the way her parents died was a bag of ass and it sucked they were so mega-dead now" It doesn't even seem to be used knowingly for comedy, and I'm sure for a lot of people it's really normal, but for me I just struggled to stay immersed from one line to the next. I kept thinking why are they so versed in recent Earth culture, is the frustrating narration implying something, would a 17 year old powerful necromancer really say that to her slave, how many times is a conversation going to wearily snap to a punchline like "because I completely ****ing hate you!"? I suspect the actual plot, from what I've gleaned, is also not for me, but since I didn't read far enough to see for myself I can't comment. Mind you, I think she nailed the awfulness of a spiteful and petty teen, which just reinforces my need to never read about her having sex with her slave in space.

**SPOILERS** This book isn't a bad book, but it's not a great one either. The great failing of it is in its character Harrowhawk. I get that she's not exactly supposed to be likable- but she's damn well insufferable. And not in a fun, anti-hero way. Just obnoxious in an out and out obnoxious way. Also, a fascist, slaver way. The weird skirting around enslavement and slavery also put me way, way off. Like, I would have expected Gideon to be a hell of a lot more pissed off about it- and every chance she could've had for the revenge she obsesses about is passed on due to 'sentiment'- or not capitalized on in the least. It's an unfortunate dynamic to have sentiments for a slaver. Especially now, with where we are in the real world, there's not much redemption to be allowed for fascists. This book goes to great lengths to allow it. There's a lot of work put into trying to work all that out, and it doesn't pan out for the author. Granted, I'm only 3/4's through the book, but the cavalier way it's been treated so far has annoyed me so much I had to put the book down. It's clear where the plot is going- and it doesn't sit right with me that one half of the relationship was literally abused and tortured by the other half. There's enemies to lovers and then there's abused slaves to abusive slavemasters lovers. Uncomfortable is putting it mildly. I also know how it ends, and it's just bad. Real bad. The sacrifice is infuriating. Basically, I expected it to be much, much better- and it could've been, except for Harrowhawk. Seeing that the sequel is all hers just about did it for me. I don't think I'll be revisiting.