It’s the kind of choice that we love to watch a character make - simultaneously everything they want and everything they hate. Harrow offers Gideon a choice that almost isn’t one: she can pretend to be Harrow’s Cavalier, or she can stay where she is and spend her life moldering in the depths of the Ninth. So he’s calling on the necromantic heirs and cavaliers of each of the nine house to come and enter the trial for Lyctorhood. It’s been a Myriad (10,000 years) and even immortal beings meet untimely ends, it seems. Gideon and Harrow’s feuding is interrupted by an unprecedented announcement. Harrow has tormented Gideon unceasingly since childhood, and Gideon hates Harrow as much Harrow hates her. Her only other desire is to do everything in her power to make Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the powerful necromantic heir of the Ninth, absolutely miserable. So she spends her days planning (and failing) to escape and training with her sword. But Gideon is indentured and without the permission of Ninth House, she’s stuck. The first is to escape the smothering, incessant gloom of the Ninth and become a soldier in the Emperor’s Cohort. It was spiky and weird, with magic that kept surprising me and the kind of characters I love–a little too smart for their own good, sarcastic, and tragic. That’s how much I enjoyed Tamsyn Muir’s novel, GIDEON THE NINTH ( Amazon). I had to restrain myself from writing this review in all-caps.
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