Gideon the Ninth

2.5 stars
Thank all the gods I'm finally finished with this damn book. im actually really proud of myself for not DNFing this freaking thing. I'm usually not one to write long, detailed reviews but this book has made me eager to write this. First, this book is so overhyped. I picked it up solely because there was an author blurb on the back from VE Schwab and I usually trust her implicitly. I have to now take author recs with a grain of salt because my trust has been wounded.
Anyway. The first 50ish pages of this book are a damn mess. I was confused from the get. World building was almost non existent, and character development was really slow. The most annoying thing was trying to ignore all the obscure words the author used. For the first half of the book I was reading on Kindle, and thank god I was because I had to look up a word on every other page. This made reading very jarring and took me out of the story. I guess if you have an extensive vocabulary, this isn't an issue, but I guess I don't. She also threw in random F words where they were totally unnecessary. Don't get me wrong, I fucking LOVE the F word, but it wasn't used right like 80% of the time.
After about 150 pages, the story sort of started to make sense, and got interesting.
The next annoying thing was that every character, and there were approximately 5000 of them, went by at LEAST four names. Their whole name, just their first or last name, their house number, their title (necromancer/cavalier), or some other random name (warden, princess, heir, daughter, etc). I can't count how many times I had to look at the Dramatis Personae to figure out who the fuck they were talking about.
Throughout the book, I found myself having to reread paragraphs, sometimes multiple times, because they didn't make sense, or my mind would wander (usually to thoughts on how to write this review). The description said there were lesbian necromancers, but in fact, the lesbian, Gideon, was a cavalier. It's never explicitly said that Harrow was gay, and I assumed she wasn't until one line at the VERY END hinted that she was. Shit, it was only hinted at that Gideon was gay. She had some dirty magazines and she had a crush on a female character. But there was absolutely no sexual tension or anything physical to develop that part of her character. I was hoping that at least near the end, Harrow and Gideon would do the whole “enemies to lovers” trope... but nope. Speaking of the ending, it was kind of anticlimactic!?!
The last thing that bothered me was THEY NEVER EXPLAINED WHY HARROW CALLED GIDEON “GRIDDLE”. Why?! TELL ME WHY?!?!? And they never explained exactly what a Lyctor is?! Like that's the whole point of the book but WTF IS IT?!?!?
There were a few things I did like about the book. One was Gideon's snarky comments. I'm also very glad that they provided backstory on why Harrow and Gideon hated each other. Even though I was still confused about it for like two chapters after. I feel like this story, the concept itself, had SO MUCH POTENTIAL. And it just wasn't written right.
Sorry y'all. This one just didn't do it for me.