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3 months ago

Darcy Reads: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Back with another review! This little number was recommended by a friend. Anytime a person tells me to read something, I decide to go forward with the vaguest expectations, but the cover gives this one away pretty quickly.

"Lesbian necromancers"... say less. (Spoilers ahead)

Story Telling (3/5): To be honest, I took a while to get into this book. Like with many other hard scifi and fantasy novels where authors built their own worlds from the ground up, there's this initial disorientation while you try to figure out what the hell is going on. They have swords so that means this is a medieval setting, right? Oh, but she mentions porn magazines. How the hell do you pronounce "Nonagesimus" (I did not discover the pronunciation guide until about halfway through)?

And then just as I think I figured out the Ninth House, we are literally transported to a whole other world with a startlingly large number of new characters that I have to memorize. Fortunately, the plot starts to pick up and we get to see Gideon interacting with people who do not immediately despise her for being a ginger haired orphan.

There are still many instances of guesswork involved in the setting and motivations, but much less than before. You could say that I was as equally clueless as Gideon. I suspect the second book, Harrowhark The Ninth, will not be as forgiving.

Plot (4/5): My own cluelessness aside, I genuinely enjoyed the plot. It was unique and engaging, hinting at a rich lore oozing with potential. There were a lot of loose strands at the end of the novel that are clearly meant to extend into a much larger story. I'm interested to see how the rest of the Houses are explored in the rest of the series.

With that being said, I also felt as if the book was being excessive, throwing out plot devices willy-nilly. I am still wondering what exactly the purpose of Coronabeth's character was or if she was just supposed to be eye candy the whole time. In addition, were the Second Houses' deaths necessary? I get the sense that Muir just wanted to create a post-apocalyptic world based on our own solar system and the characters that came from the less important planets were just an afterthought.

With that being said, I genuinely did enjoy the plot. While it started out slow, the tension kept building. Each gruesome death further proved how much danger Gideon and Harrowhark were really in. I appreciate Gideon's sacrifice being an actual sacrifice. She's not going to be resurrected or returned to her body. She will stay in Harrowhark's head, annoying her with bad puns and reminding her to drink more protein shakes. The more I think back on it, the more credit I have to give it.

Characters (4/5): While this book has a lot more characters than I care for, some significantly less necessary than others (looking at you Crux and Coronabeth), I appreciate the effort to give each one a unique personality and motivation. There are still some tropes, such as the fatherly figure that makes bad puns, the embarrassed teens, the meek nerd, etc., but at least they are developed in the short time before their brutal deaths.

I especially like Gideon. Immature. Stubborn. Strong Morals. Biceps that you can sink your teeth into. Gideon's frustration with Harrowhark and the Ninth Planet is justified, but I respect that she tries her best to meet their demands. Similarly, while I can't say that I like Harrowhark, her backstory as an engineered monster makes her at least somewhat sympathetic.

Characters I didn't enjoy: Cytherea and Dulcinea. I am intentionally counting those as separate entities. I understand that Cytherea is meant to bring Gideon and Harrowhark closer to the Emperor and drive the plot as a whole, but I wish her lore was more explicit earlier in the story. The Emperor and his Lyctors are only vaguely mentioned and frankly, I'm still unsure what Lyctorhood is all about. While I love a big baddy, Cytherea's introduction and motives were introduced too late for me.

As for Dulcinea, I suspected she had darker motives right from the beginning. It was too ideal to have a sweet, sickly, girl fainting lavishly around a derelict castle (laboratory?). She was Chekov's missile tank. While I appreciated watching Gideon get flustered with gay panic, I kept waiting for the other shoe to eventually drop. It was only two dimensional, which I suppose makes sense once the twist is revealed.

Final Thoughts: I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Locked Tomb books. While confusing, the setting and plot were refreshing. I'm almost disappointed that we won't see most of the same characters in book #2, but I'm sure Muir already has a massive lineup of replacements waiting for us.

Furthermore, It's great reading a story that hits the queer aesthetic dead on. Save the rainbows and club mixes for June. The rest of the year, we like our lazy goth aesthetic, our gritty cyberpunk core, and our lovecraftian lore, etc.

While I am a sucker for romance and shipping wars, it can get quite repetitive. I'm also glad that the novel does not veer in that direction. Harrowhark and Gideon's relationship evolved more naturally. Even though I partially expected a more romantic payoff, I am not at all disappointed with the ending. It's a unique dynamic to have your potential love interest mesh their soul with yours and share the same body to become a powerhouse of magic and sword fighting. I don't think I've ever encountered anything quite like

oh.

Darcy Reads: Artemis by Andy Weir

So this is my first book review on this account. Full disclaimer, I have no plans of keeping a tight schedule for these things. My goal is to finish at least 24 books in 2025 and this is book #1. If you're still reading this, let's jump into the actual review...(Spoilers ahead)

Storytelling (4/5): While Jazz is bouncing around on the moon (sometimes literally), she explains in excruciating detail the many mechanisms required to live in Artemis indefinitely. Ever wondered what would happen if there was a fire on the moon? Or maybe you wondered what kind of industries could operate up there. Jazz doesn't answer every question, but she sure covers a lot of ground. You start to feel like your are visiting Artemis for the first time and Jazz is your personal tour guide. In fact, there's a scene where a tourist asks EVA master Bob several questions about walking on the moon and somehow it seems a lot more forced than just listening to Jazz silently explain everything herself. I'm not a scientist, so I'm not going to even pretend to know whether or not her explanations make any sense. I can however say that Jazz's scientific rantings are entertaining and I feel like I might know just a smidge more about astronomy than I did before reading.

Plot (2.5/5): Science jargon aside, the plot itself is very transparent. It's a double heist feature. Heist one: Jazz is commissioned to sabotage Sanchez Aluminum. She's confident that she can get it done, but we're not even a third of the way through the book yet. Jazz fails due to a series of unfortunate accidents, but at least she was able to make it back to Artemis in one piece and nobody got hurt. Heist two: Jazz's client gets assassinated and she uncovers a plot by the Brazilian mafia to take over the moon. She pulls together a ragtag team, including a Ukrainian mad scientist, her ex best friend, her genius father, a teenage billionaire, and Bob. She even takes a moment to give an inspirational speech about saving Artemis and working as a team (she also pokes fun at herself for saying such a speech, but this still a sin in my humble opinion). Their plan works despite some asteroid sized hiccups. Jazz makes a heroic sacrifice, but you don't even have to finish the novel to know that she will survive and that Artemis will be saved.

That's all. I can think of at least a dozen pieces of media that follow a very similar if not identical path as Artemis. With that being said, clichés exist for a reason. We like them. At least having it all play out on the moon makes it more noteworthy than Ocean's 26. I am also happy for any futuristic science fiction story that does not immediately ooze misanthropy and depression.

Characters (3/5): I don't like Jazz - wait here me out. I also don't hate her. Jazz is a well developed character. She's competent and she's flawed. She's ambitious and she harbors some doubts. She has a backstory that I think many people can sympathize with. I appreciate that even after everything she experienced before the start of the novel, Jazz is still the same smartass that got her into that trouble. Does she regret anything? Yes. Will she stop all of her antics and live a peaceful, law abiding life? Absolutely not.

If you like Jazz, that's great. My reasons for disliking her are completely personal. I wouldn't ever want to be friends with her, but that doesn't make her a bad character by any stretch.

As for the other characters, they are very much like the plot itself. While detailed and entertaining, there truly are no surprises. Svoboda is a lovesick nerd, Ammar is the cranky but devoted father, Rudy is a no nonsense cop, etc. Everyone has a specific role that they play out perfectly. It's disappointing. To the very end, I hoped for at least one surprise either in the form of a turncoat or an unexpected ally. How much more interesting would it have been if Jazz's longtime pen pal Kelvin was actually working with O Palácio right from the start? Or what if Rudy joined in on their plans? Instead, we get characters that are only there to help develop Jazz's story. What kind of person is Dale? He's Jazz's ex best friend, he's gay, and - oh yeah he's Jewish. I guess that counts as personality trait (NOTE: it definitely does not). We don't learn anything else about him because nothing else matters. It would have been a lot more interesting to hear how exactly he and Jazz became so close and what happened when he stole Jazz's then boyfriend. Alas, that's an entirely different story that just doesn't fit well into Weir's moon heists.

Final Thoughts: Overall, I didn't have any expectations for this book. I stumbled across it in a used bookstore and my first thought was "Wait, that guy who wrote The Martian has other books?" (I have not read The Martian). Even after finishing this book, I feel very neutral. The characters are entertaining and the worldbuilding is top notch, but I'm not compelled to look for anything more. I can say that the most interesting thing about this book is the amount of thought and research Weir put into it to justify an entire civilization living on the moon. But again, I am not a science person, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Artemis feels like the start of something bigger. It's laying down the groundwork for what could potentially expand into something much much bigger than it currently is. If humans can live on the moon, what's to stop anyone from colonizing other planets? What happens if they put more than one city on the moon? I'm not saying that this has to be expanded into a series, but it would be a prime setting for some good old RPG. Like Jazz herself, there is some potential there, waiting to be expanded upon.

And in case anyone else is wondering: I would never ever want to live in Artemis. I wouldn't even want to visit it. It's a bouncy castle prison with terrifyingly poor safety measures.