Gideon the Ninth

I've debated whether to give this two or three stars. I may still change my mind.

The story is pretty good. I like the idea of the Nine Houses, and their very different cultures and focuses on different aspects of a similar skill set. Plotwise, the book is basically all setup — it has an appropriate and self-contained plot arc and climax and finale, but the nature of the story is to be training wheels for what comes next.

The writing is absolutely atrocious. An editor has clearly fallen asleep on the job. It reads like mediocre fanfiction. It uses incongruous prose from the viewpoint of its protagonist, who speaks like no other character in the book's universe, because the author thinks it sounds cool, and leans heavily on expletives as crutches that they hope will make you think so too. It doesn't work. Every time I read another example of it, which is at least once every few pages, it pulls me out of the book. There is also an element introduced early, referenced often, and brought back in the climax like Chekhov's Gun, but to no great effect. It could have been omitted entirely at no loss.

There's a fairly complex mythology underpinning all of this, which the characters know well and you don't, and you're dropped in the middle of it and expected to work from context. That's fine, but I was never entirely sure that it wasn't being made up as it went along. New elements were introduced frequently right up until the end. The real test will be whether book two continues that pattern, or whether it works within the structures that book one has made.

That mythology is actually pretty neat, and the end of the climax into the denouement is really very daring. I can't say I saw it coming at all. I hated the writing an awful lot, but I might wind up reading the next book anyway. It almost has to be very different.

EDITED: Reduced to two stars. My god, I thought I was choosing between 1 and 2, can't believe I ever considered 3.