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Have I mentioned the Cohort? You do know the Cohort, right? The Cohort I’ve left to enlist in … thirty-three times?”
Clumsy exposition-as-dialogue.
“I see that your genius strategy, Griddle,” said a final voice from the tierway, “was to order a shuttle and walk out the door.”
Well when you say it that way it sounds stupid.
Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality.
[sings] Stuck on the planet... of the gooooooths.
a peanut gallery of sad old waist-high masks.
Would anyone in this world, let alone a Sad Girl who has grown up trying to escape the planet of the goths, have reason to know what a "peanut gallery" is?
“But I don’t even remember about you most of the time.”
Don Draper in the elevator vibes.
“You don’t care,” said Gideon. “You’d have the nuns eat each other if you got bored. You are a psychopath.”
I'm already getting tired of having all my information about this character relayed through the ostensible protagonist's sarcastic dialogue.
“I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun,” said Gideon,
Dialogue on life support at this point.
It was very dark: a rail of gas-discharged light ran all around the aisles, but it always lit like it didn’t like the idea and glowed dismally.
Each preferred to pray two sets of beads, one string in each shrivelled hand, so they sat there clicking a four-part percussion with their suspiciously agile fingers.
Christ, this is about someone who resented going to Catholic school, isn't it?
He was a sensitive, awful young man, and his mother was obsessed with him; each time he caught a cold he was swaddled and made to lie still until he got bedsores.
First interesting character dynamic.
It was such a huge bag of ass how it had happened:
a querulous excitement arose from the assorted Ninth congregation. There were soft cries of joy. There were exclamations of praise and thankfulness.
Kind of weird that we have not heard from any of these people. What is life like for an everyday person here?
Pelleamena gently inclined her head in a way she never had in life: alive, she had been as chill and remote as ice at the bottom of a cave.
She got the depression.
Prose to make one reflect on the usefulness of shame as an emotion.
“That’s three jobs,” said Harrowhark. “Die in a fire, Nonagesimus.”
Dialogue this sparkling can usually only be found in the most antisocial 2000s gaming webcomics.
While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade.
What the hell is the internet doing here.
They were lurking in the personal Nonagesimus library, a stone-arched room packed tight with shelves of the musty and neglected books Harrowhark didn’t study and the musty, less neglected books that she did.
I will succeed with you in tow and nobody will ever know that there was aught amiss with the House of the Ninth.
What I don't get, at this point, is what possible incentive Gideon has to go along with this, or how Harrow could ever afford to let her go with the information she knows.
Her salute was as crisp as her flawless Cohort uniform, and when Teacher beckoned, she marched forward with a gait as starched as her officer’s scarlets and snowy white necktie.
Description so condensed as to be flippant.
There was a rusting basin and tap, where one love-abandoned towel had sat for God only knew how long, decayed to a waterfall of spiderous threads.
Don't forget to bring a towel.
It was a stupid, secretive Ninth thing to do, done out of habit, and Gideon hated how comforting it felt.
Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie.
Guuuuh.
She had the distant, brow-puckered frown of a woman untying gruesomely knotted shoelaces.
Do shoes have laces in this world?
Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
So Mean Girls references survive untold millions of years into the future?
“Leave it. The die is cast,”
Not sure I trust this author to use that phrase correctly.
“Sextus,” she said, as though to a very stupid child, “your necromancer is wounded.
Cavalier, surely?
“Keep an eye on her, Nav,” said Palamedes quickly.
Wait, when did he learn her last name?
Gideon decided, then and there, her betrayal.
Doesn't really feel earned.
“And here I am, narking all over again.”
Fascinating choice to make a new verb that gets "narc" some distance away from its colloquial roots.
An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
Yes, too bad we didn't get these stories.
