Ylva’s Reviews > Gideon the Ninth > Status Update

"You're a nice girl," the Lyctor said. "I had a nice girl as a cavalier too...once. She died for me. What can you do?"

Insane thing to ask. What can't Camilla Hect do?

WHO is doing it like the Eighth House ❤️ let’s be overzealous and off-putting and needlessly antagonistic and categorically anti-immortality for entirely the wrong reasons and yet somehow at the end of the day still hold the moral high ground, just like great (great great great etc) grandmama

"Captain, you are of no use to anyone dead."
"It is my privilege to no longer be of use."

All Judith Deuteros has ever wanted is to die a noble and completely preventable death with net zero impact on the story, but unfortunately everyone around her is as committed to making sure she does not do that for equally unclear reasons

"Warden--that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She's being an absolute cad, and I'm not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight."
"Nor should you be."

God!!! the specific/banal/confusing heartbreak of being 2nd/3rd/6th house and pitted, life or death, against people you've known, not liked, not agreed with, but known!!! your whole life

We have no reason to believe that Cytherea was clued in to honestly either of the deeply ill-advised polycules responsible for Gideon's conception, which invites the fascinating question of what her read on the strange irreverent teenager from Anastasia's doomed frozen gulag planet with Alecto's eyes/G1deon's name/Pyrrha's glasses/Wake's looks could possibly have been

"Judith!" said Corona, more coaxingly, before an interhousal war kicked off. "This is us. You've come to all our birthday parties."

Can't even pull military rank and take charge of a grisly possibly haunted double homicide crime scene without your crush going Remember how I only got to choose one person to invite just for me and every year I chose you? in front of everyone either of you knows #JudithDeuterosMoment

"Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me." (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously /Dyas/ raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him)

The cocky soldier romantasy love interest archetype can actually be tremendously interesting, provided that everyone around him only starts caring if he lives or dies when actively hunting him for sport

“And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken /me/“

It was touch-and-go there for a while but the most normal twins in the world have brought it home as the the Most duo in this house<3

When Colum held her sword out to her, horizontally in one hand, it was as cavalier to cavalier.
"The next time we meet," he said beneath his breath, as monolithic and impassive as when she'd arrived, "I think it's likely one of us will die."
"Yeah," Gideon said, "yeah," instead of "I'm sorry."

Tamsyn Muir make 1 character who is not genre/world/heartshattering to an impossible degree. we can't keep doing this

“The Seventh would have sealed me in a beautiful tomb and not talked about me again. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. So I came here when the Emperor asked me…because I wanted to…even though I knew I came here to die.”
Gideon said, “But I don’t want you to die,” and realised a second afterward that she had said it aloud.

This is the heart of our irreverent narrator. There is no beauty in death