Her fiery red coif gives the cover a splash of color similarly, her incandescent personality lends levity to the novel’s gothic, often grotesque proceedings. It’s Gideon you see on the striking cover, clad in all black, her face covered with skull paint and aviator shades, walking away, sword drawn, from an explosion of skeletons. The story is told from the perspective of the eponymous heroine, Gideon Nav, an indentured servant in the Ninth House. After all, the stakes are higher than life and death – they’re life and undeath. There’s plenty of humor, but Muir treats her characters and their problems with the gravity they deserve. The cover and content are pulpy, but the prose is literary.
The characters are primarily young adults, but the content and themes transcend the YA label.
How do you categorize a book that does all it can to resist labels and push boundaries? On the bright side, that means Gideon has something for nearly everyone: space travel for science fiction fans, magic for fantasy fanatics, skeletons and other undead abominations for horror enthusiasts, romance for – well, romance readers. I feel sorry for my co-workers that had to catalogue Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth.
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