lesbian necromancers in space, and it took me a hundred pages to stop being annoyed by the jokes

first thirty pages I nearly put this down. the voice is SO much. Gideon narrates like she is posting, everything is a bit, and I remember thinking mate can you please just describe the room.

and then somewhere around the point where they get to the house it clicked and I realised the joking is armour, it is a nineteen year old who has been raised in a bone hell by people who do not like her and has exactly one coping mechanism. once I got that I stopped fighting it and the back half of this book is unbelievable.

structurally it's a locked-room murder mystery in a haunted mansion where all the suspects are wizards, which is a completely absurd sentence and also just accurate. the necromancer school stuff is doing the thing where you learn a magic system by watching people use it badly.

the reveal about Harrow, which I will not go near, made me go back and reread about sixty pages immediately, and everything is there. everything was there the whole time.

eight not higher because I genuinely could not keep the nine houses straight and I do not think the book helps you enough, I was flicking to the character list constantly and that breaks the spell. also the memes date it. in ten years half these lines are going to read like a T-shirt from 2019.

my Discord is split down the middle on this book which I think means it is doing something right. read it, and give it a hundred pages before you decide.