She's that one goth girl from high school gone full dark supernova with her sacramental face paint and unfathomable necromantic powers.

Seriously awesome, because the coolest thing about it was that we got to see it all and experience it all through the aviator-shaded eyes of Gideon Nav, unwilling cavalier of the Ninth House, who kicked ass, took names, always had a dirty joke handy and so loved her icy, genius Ninth House necromancer, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, that (spoiler alert) she ultimately gave her life to turn Harrow into a Lyctor - a kind of superhero bodyguard and magical ghost assassin working at the right hand of the undying God-emperor of Muir's expansive, creaking world. She created a crumbly, dusty, deeply haunted and wonderfully goopy horror-universe with Gideon the Ninth, peopled it with creepy, sepulchral wizards, dipped it all in the reverential tones of quasi-Catholic religious fanaticism, wrote it like a science-fantasy parlor romance full of murder and then gave it to us, still warm and dripping, like a cat bringing home a particularly juicy mouse.Īnd it was awesome. Last year, Tamsyn Muir absolutely owned the lesbian-necromancers-in-space genre. You know how sometimes people say, It's like everything you loved about the first book, only MORE. You don't have to read the first book in this series to dive right into the second. Some people have talked about Gideon and Harrow having a kismetic (?sp?) relationship and I would totally disagree, but that's out there (I think that if anything, Ianthe and Corona are closer to kismesis, and if you wanted to shove the cav-necro relationship onto a shipping chart most of them are probably closer to moirails than anything else, or the 'ideal' relationship between cavalier and necromancer is, anyway, that sort of 'life partner you will call on their shit and also die for/without but not SUPPOSEDLY romantic ha ha oops please look over that way').You know how sometimes people say, Oh, it's okay. The houses (particularly the Seventh house having 'blood cancer') felt a little bit like the blood colors to me, but not so much so that they seemed derivative just in the way that they have general traits and abilities associated with them, and to some degree colors and reputations amongst each other.

Gideon the ninth