Nona the Ninth drops tomorrow! I've been madly anticipating it since I first read the last line of Harrow, and decided, after discussing the Locked Tomb series with someone I'd recc'd it to, that I'd forgotten far too many pertinent details since Gideon first came out in 2019. The central mystery of it all, concerning God, and his lyctors, and the twisted timeline demanded a reread. I embarked on one amidst my newfound duties as Doberman-Beagle referee and finished up Harrow last week.
"We do bones, motherf*cker."
Rereads are, in general, risky things. We return to a book at one time thought beloved, only to find that, in the intervening years, we've grown older, grown wiser; found that our tastes have changed, or that the book was one of those "book of the moment" phenomena, and that we got caught up in the thrill of sharing it with so many people; right place, right time, very relevant for the day of its release. I don't reread very often, mostly because there's so many books I want to read for the first time, and so little time in which to read them. I've had rereads that were disappointing because I realized that it was wanting to know what happened next that colored my impression of the book on the first read, but that, upon return, the prose fell flat amidst a cast of unremarkable characters. The first read was a headlong rush to know; once I knew, the meat of the book turned out not to be meat at all, but some addictive, mindlessly consumed carbohydrate snack that left me ultimately unsatisfied and vaguely nauseated.
I'm pleased to report that Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth not only hold up, but were, at least for me, even more enjoyable on a second read.
Ignore all the publisher's kitschy, trope-centered marketing of this series. I love tropes, and I understand why they make for such effective marketing bullet points, but I think the snappy little taglines utterly fail to capture the magic of books like these. I reviewed Gideon back when I first read it, so I won't rehash all that. The second book, Harrow, turns everything that happened in Gideon on its head - in a fun way - and expands on the universe Muir created in wholly unexpected, fantastically weird fashion. This is my current favorite ongoing series, and that's all down to its author.
So much of this series shouldn't work on paper, but it works delightfully and beautifully in Tamsyn Muir's hands. If I had to pin down a genre for it, I'd call it horror. I'd forgotten how gory and bloody so much of the action is. Big yikes. But also, as horror, it tackles fear, primal instinct, and so many of those big questions about autonomy, and ethics, and the afterlife. It's Gothic spooky, but also sci-fi spooky - I stand by my Alien comparison - and deeply unsettling, at moments. The characters are what sell it. They are so vivid, and real, and complex, and human, and loveable in all their fucked-upedness.
The end of Harrow is ?????, and so I can't wait to dive into Nona.This is the sort of series that raises two questions for every one that it answers, but through its deft characterization, its overflowing life amidst relentless death, its tangents of pure poetry, you know that you can trust Muir to bring it all home in the end.
Cannot reccomend this series enough.
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