It’s been three months since I read Gideon the Ninth, so I was prepared for it to take a little bit to get back into the story. I was also expecting it to be a little less enjoyable at the beginning because I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow last book and I knew she would be the main character this time. So I was prepared to have a rough start. 

What I was not prepared for was absolute incomprehensibility. 

Some books feel like giant puzzles where the story keeps handing you pieces and it isn’t until the end where you figure out how they all fit together. This book does not feel like that. This book feels like it handed you a large box full of pulpy sludge, then at 74% of the way through the book it casts the spell to turn the sludge into puzzle pieces at which point they come together fairly easily. 

If 74% feels like an oddly specific number, that’s because I checked. I looked at the time stamp for when the book started to make sense, because it took a very long time. The first three-quarters of the book are almost entirely incomprehensible. They go hard into the unreality and “unreliable narrator is unreliable because she can’t remember and isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real.” It goes back and forth between Harrow’s new life as a Lyctor and a retelling of book one where Gideon doesn’t exist. The timelines are all mixed up. It’s hard to tell when events are actually supposed to be taking place, and I’m pretty sure both timelines are told out of order anyway (but there’s no temporal markers so it’s hard to tell). It’s a crapshoot if you can figure out who’s speaking or even in the scene at the start. And the bulk of it is told in second person, which really threw me for the first few hours and never stopped feeling weird and jarring. 

And after all that, can you guess the moment that made me pause the book and stare into space asking myself if I really just heard what I thought I just heard? It wasn’t the unexpected betrayal, or the murder attempts, or the body under the bed or the weird blood river or the fact that God’s name is John. It was the moment where God was explaining a potential galaxy-ending apocalypse to Harrow and, right in the middle of a serious conversation, made an absolutely serious none pizza left beef reference. Out of all the incomprehensible nonsense that came before, that was the moment where I stopped the book, reconsidered my reading choices, and started wondering what kind of person Tamsyn Muir is to put a fucking meme reference in her elaborate and serious book. 

Once I was paying attention, there was a surprising amount of memes and internet culture referenced in a gory and intense drama about necromancers in space. These included a “She wants the D” joke, a pun on the word “barista”, an honest-to-goodness “Hi, _, I’m dad” joke, and references to bone hurting juice and Miette. Am I supposed to be taking this seriously? Every single other thing in the book is very serious – and yet there are no less than five meme/joke references. What am I supposed to think? 

I very nearly DNF’d this early on. Gideon was my favorite character and she wasn’t there. I didn’t really like Harrow that much in book one when she was badass, and I liked her even less when she was spending much of her time unconscious and not doing anything when she was awake. The other Lyctors were mean, standoffish, and incredibly unlikeable, and the Emperor was stiff and bland whenever he was on page. And even though I was spending a lot of brainpower trying to figure out what the hell was going on, there was zero plot whatsoever. Harrow wasn’t even doing anything – other people around her did stuff, but she did nothing except walk around, be confused about her own memories, and see things that weren’t there, interspersed with retold scenes from book one, except they were the scenes where very little happened and had no Gideon. There wasn’t even any interesting settings to explore, since instead of cool and creepy planets, this book takes place almost exclusively on a largely nondescript spaceship. Up until about halfway through, I really didn’t like this book. 

But I stuck it out, mainly because I wanted to see if I was right in my suspicions (and hopes) that the end of book one would get undone in some way. And around the halfway point, I warmed up a bit to Harrow and the barest hint of a plot kicked in. So I felt mildly validated in pushing through the first half (which was about 10 hours, it’s an almost 20-hour audiobook) and kept reading. 

Then the book hit the 74% mark and went from zero to sixty over the course of a few minutes. The book cast the spell that turned my box of fibrous sludge into puzzle pieces, I started slamming those pieces together as fast as my brain could whir, Harrow started to actually do things, a plot (of a sort) finally kicked into gear, and the last 26% of the book was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. I got some of the answers I wanted from book one, I got some answers to questions I didn’t even know I had that just added more twists, there was action, there was drama, there were surprises, some of my suspicions about book one’s ending were validated and some of them were not. It was great. 

Was it worth the first half being unenjoyable and another quarter being mediocre? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to make of this book. The last 26% was amazing. The first half was terrible. The book seemed to skip engaging characters or intriguing plot and go straight for “if they don’t understand what’s happening, they’ll want to read on and find out,” but then overdid it so hard that it tipped over into obnoxious and frustrating. But also that ending answered a lot of my questions from book one, which is a large part of what I wanted out of this book, and came with some really stellar action sequences towards the end. 

This review is very long because this is a very long book and I do not know what to make of it in the least. I think the first three-quarters could have been cut down to half its length, easily, without harming the story and probably making it better. I pushed through reading the whole thing and I don’t know if it was worth it. The confusing thing is that I definitely didn’t dislike this book. I don’t think I liked it, either. And I’m not even ambivalent about it. I’m having some kind of feeling about Harrow the Ninth, but I have no idea what. My opinions are about as incomprehensible as the majority of this book. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book. Maybe? I’m gonna need some time to untangle the disaster of whatever I feel about this one first.