I don’t think I’ve read a science fantasy book before, so this was a cool first for me. It also had more horror elements than I typically read, and I found the darkness didn’t bother me (mostly). I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I’ve realized that I tend to have trouble explaining my feelings on 3-star reads and the mix of things that worked and didn’t work for me, but let’s give it a go.
Gideon Nav is an orphan living in the Ninth House and has been indentured there since she was born. She is desperate to get off the planet and live her own life, and when Harrowhark, the heir to the House and Gideon’s nemesis gives her a way to do that, she – well, she doesn’t jump at the chance, but she does agree. Agreeing means being Harrow’s cavalier during a competition in which Harrow and the heirs (all necromancers) and cavaliers of the seven other Houses try to become new Lyctors for the 10,000-year-old Emperor.
The book is funny. It’s not a comedy, but it is funny, sometimes laugh out loud (this description at the beginning really got me: “. . . whose main claim to fame was that he was slightly more decrepit alive than some of the legitimately dead”). Muir’s use of humor is so skillful that it somehow doesn’t seem out of place even in some of the darkest parts of the novel. Gideon herself is a funny character, and I really felt called out here: “This calls for rigor, Nav.” “‘Maybe rigor . . . mortis,‘ said Gideon, who assumed that puns were automatically funny.”
We start to get to know Gideon, from whose 3rd person perspective the book is told, but I would have liked to get to know her internal world even more. I have some idea of who she is and want to know more. One that about her that I really appreciated is that Muir just lets her exist and live her life as a lesbian, without the focus having to be on any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. While Gideon definitely develops feelings for other characters, that’s not the focus of the book. She and Harrow also start to become closer. At first, this is at a snail’s pace, which fit with their history of hostility. Later in the book it seemed to rush a bit. Which leads me to the pacing of the novel as a whole. I liked the beginning, and the end was also very fast-paced, although the battle at the end felt a little long, but the book felt slow in the middle, especially the parts where Gideon is just wandering around with nothing to do. This is how we start to learn about the other characters, but I was also waiting for something to happen.
There’s limited world-building, which for the most part also fits. You don’t need to know much since this ends up being almost like a locked room mystery, with events unfolding within this one house. That said, I would have liked a little more information on the types of necromancy that the others Houses specialize in and what their roles within the Empire are supposed to be.
I liked the humor and the writing style and thought Muir created an interesting world with fairly clearly-delineated characters – which is good when the cast of characters is this large. The uneven pacing and lack of depth to some of the characters and relationships were what was lacking to me. The ending was phenomenal. I haven’t decided whether I’ll read Harrow the Ninth. I’m intrigued enough to maybe want to read on, but probably not right away.