The original percy jackson series is about cycles of abuse and neglect, right. Were introduced to percy as a kid who has clearly been left behind by a school system that has given up on him, restless and unengaged and self-defetist because hes been given nothing that works for him and no one even tries to meet him where he is. Then hes told no, listen, your neurodivergence is amazing and you just need to be given something that actually utilizes your unique palatte. And thats obviously the uplifting idea rick wanted for his kids, right. But once we get to know chb the same cycles are happening there too. There are kids “left behind” there too for one reason or another, because their parents dont want to claim them, because their parents werent important enough to get a cabin. Do you get it, all the kids who dont fit the most common neurotypes get shoved into the same closet. Kids are being left in a cruel world to fend for themselves without the tools they need. Theyre dying because no one bothered to accommodate them. Its such an obvious parallel that the first chapter introduces a teacher whos written to be especially hard on percys disability and she turns out to literally be one of these monsters trying to kill him. Meanwhile sally jackson tells him she named him after Perseus because she wanted a redemption for a hero whos story ended in tragedy. Meanwhile every book in the series replicates a greek myth step for step until the moment they break the cycle. Annabeth, playing Odysseus, is talked down from her hubris and grounded by her friends. Percy, playing Heracles, meets someone wronged by the original Heracles and rights his wrongs by refusing to go down the same selfish path as him. Monsters are reborn because they are–as the books explicitly call them–achetypes. These kids are stuck inside the cyclical nature of mythology because thats what happens to mythology, it gets retold over and over again. But these are the kids who have to live it. The series ends with percy being offered immortality and he rejects it because he wants to use his godly favor to force them to break their cycle of neglecting their kids. The series ends with a declaration that we cant keep letting this happen. The very first book offees the same choice. It ends with percy refusing to keep the head of medusa as a spoil of war, refusing his heroic reward. He lets his mother have the head and use it to kill gabe. Isnt that fucking crazy for a kids book? Gabe wasnt a Monster. He wasnt going to Turn to Dust and Disappear in a narratively convenient way. He was a living breathing mortal dude and percy and his mom killed him without remorse. Break the cycle of abuse!!!! Dont let this happen again!!! Anyway thats why the original percy jackson series is Hey where are you going with our breadsticks
of all the plot twists in the locked tomb literally NOTHING hits quite as hard as the twist in GtN that the only reason gideon and harrow “”“hate”“” each other is because they hate themselves and assume the other one has to hate them the same way and the second they both come clean about that they’re immediately ready to drop it and die for each other in Grand Displays Of Dramatic Lesbianism. like it still fucks me up every time i think about it
marketing gideon the ninth as “lesbian necromancers in space! need i say more?” is so funny to me because like. that’s TECHNICALLY an accurate description but it doesn’t SAY anything. the reader is not prepared for the several murders. the reader is not prepared for gideon and harrow’s Whole Thing. the reader is not prepared for ianthe tridentarius
I began reading Gideon the Ninth again - i dunno, it’s like the 6th reread so far. And It’s actually a good thing that I read digital copies because if I had the physical book, I’d literally take a bite like a sandwich. Like an actual bite with my teeth. It drives me so insane that I’d be motivated to keep going as my gums bleed trying to saw through the cardboard covers (yeah, I’d buy hard cover) and violently grunting until my upper central incisors meet my lower. Like wtf has this book done to me.
“Oh, Griddle! But I don’t even remember about you most the time!” I’ve been internally screaming about this line. Violently screaming because the book is almost completely centered around this lie. It’s not even the end where it’s all revealed so bluntly with “I am undone without you!” but literally the same chapter where she explains, “I got more hot and bothered digging all night.”
OH YEAH, I BARELY THINK ABOUT YOU, I JUST THOUGHT TO, YOU KNOW, DIG THROUGH PACKED DIRT WITH MY BARE FUCKING HANDS ALL GODDAMN NIGHT SO THAT I NEVER SEE YOU LEAVE. BECAUSE YOU LEAVING WILL UNMAKE ME, BUT YOU KNOW… LIKE… AN AFTERTHOUGHT… YOU GET IT
There are so many one liners where I just have to put the book down for a bit and pace around the room manically.
This book makes me so unwell and yet - AND YET - I’m like, “gee what happens on the NEXT page!”
I am 15% of the way through Harrow the Ninth. There are no plot spoilers below.
“Second person, past tense” is a really weird choice for a novel’s narration, and I will be disappointed if this does not pay off mightily.
Most pieces I see in second person POV are short stories. The goal is to establish intimacy and immediacy, and they are most commonly in the present tense. The notion is that the action is happening to you, right now, and you are finding out about it as you the reader go through the story. Occasionally you see such a story in the future tense, suggesting someone is prophesying to you.
Second person, past tense is someone telling you your own history. This is kind of weird. One assumes a Memento story with an amnesia premise, or similarly Merlin living backwards in time. The second person here raises the question of who is telling you the story. The past tense raise the question of why you need someone to tell you your own story.
That our protagonist is explicitly and demonstrably insane gives us a lot of “why,” although the particular “why” depends on the “who.” The most obvious “who” is that Harrow is telling herself her own story. We have already seen Harrow telling herself her own story within this story, so adding another layer of recursion seems obvious and later adding multiple seems fun.
But here we reach a fork that we cannot resolve this early in the book. Is Harrow in a moment of lucidity telling herself what she should already know? Is Harrow in a moment of insanity hallucinating a new history? Is Harrow just lying to herself because the ending of Gideon the Ninth was too painful?
Harrow the Ninth is sometimes described as gaslighting the reader about Gideon the Ninth. Someone is not telling the truth about something here. One character seems to have noticed, but it is hard to be sure when our narrator is unreliable and may be hallucinating and/or lying.
Gideon was a somewhat unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lied (except perhaps about her emotions, except perhaps mostly to herself) but in that she was not paying attention, like the meme post in circulation about a movie showing the start of World War I from the perspective of a pet pigeon. You can probably identify all the important plot points of Gideon the Ninth by how boring Gideon finds them.
Harrow is more classically unreliable. She has a skewed perspective, and within that perspective she hallucinates, and on top of those hallucinations she will deceive herself and others. This early in the book, we already have many examples of Harrow seeing things that aren’t there. She tends to realize within a page or two that she is hallucinating. The big news at some point should be that those little hallucinations were within the context of a larger hallucination and/or lie.
And now I need to go finish the book so I can check my Tumblr notifications without worrying about spoilers in the notes.
ALT
