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A review by storytold
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
4.25
Tried to avoid need of a spoiler cut, but this review does discuss the meta project of the book and positions it within the series, with whatever amount of spoiler that entails.
I found this the most coherently written of the series, and comparing notes with a friend (who didn’t strictly agree with my conclusions but led me to better ones nonetheless), I think it’s down to genre. This is a book about a child having adventures with her weird friends, her weird family, and her world that’s falling apart; it’s framed and written like an adventure for a younger audience, though it is not. At one point Nona’s parents are saying something opaque about the worldbuilding, and Nona answers by summarizing what they said, in the form of a question, thus condensing and clarifying what was said—you know, like a book for younger readers would to ensure the plot point was understood. When did GT9 or HT9 hold the reader’s hand like that? It was kind of delightful to see the degree to which Muir trusts the reader rendered in such stark terms. In general I found events followed from each other more rationally than in previous books (with caveats; dual timeline notwithstanding, and also… significant portions of the second half of the book notwithstanding), and the writing was generally clearer because Nona *didn’t* have more information than the reader does, which was the main obstacle to clarity in HT9 especially. I noted in both my reads of Ht9 that the narrators understand their own world and so describe it in a way that feels opaque to a reader without access to that knowledge, those senses. Much of this book did not have that problem. It felt like a flex from Muir, like She Can Do Both. Reading this book reminded me of reading Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, which may as well have been crafted from cast-off material from this book.
The back half becomes less reader-friendly, even dragging in places once we return to the world that is the legacy of GT9 and HT9, and my rating fell because of it. One very spoilery element in particular really got my goat with its underexplanation, but I think it’ll matter a lot more in the next book so I’m willing to withhold judgment. So it's not like you're sailing through a world with perfectly rendered graphics all of a sudden; it's still a puzzlebox and leaves the reader doing a great deal of connecting their own dots, with dubious accuracy. I do recommend a reread of especially HT9 for anyone fuzzy on the details before diving in, because this book demands a lot of its reader’s ability to contextualize this book's events in the wider universe.
But ultimately: this book is about love, and I fucking loved it for that reason. It comes at it kind of sideways, and I think it’s easy to think “What’s the point?” of this book without conceiving of it as a response to key passages in the books that came before it. In HT9, Harrow is snuggling with her constant hallucination on the night before she thinks she’s going to die, and she is so desperate to feel loved, and her hallucination can’t give that to her. This whole book felt like a direct response to that heartbreaking scene. It felt like an exploration of the scene where Ortus says to Harrow in HT9, “I should have saved you; I was a grown man and you and Gideon were both children,” or when Harrow and John are talking about the tomb, and Harrow says, “I was 10 years old but I wasn’t a child.” This book is about a child who, unlike Harrow and Gideon, is well loved, for a time. As a secondary project, it is establishing worldbuilding details that will matter in the next book, and the priorities of this book do make it feel apart from the central plot. I don’t think it is. I think it is fundamental to the quartet in ways we don’t totally understand yet, but I have absolute faith that will become clear once we have all four books taken together. This book is not really “of” the world of Lyctors, but it is about the Nine Houses, and it is most certainly about Harrowhark. It’s an alternate history that is also real. In the end I think this will matter so, so much.
I will never read another series like this, and I will return to it again and again, probably next year. I cried many times reading this. Once again I didn’t love the ending and am critical of the structure, but it’s an experimental structural quartet and it unlocks shrimp emotions in me, so what can I really ask? What a wonderful feeling, to be critical of something and love it so much at the same time. If you got through Harrow, this is worth picking up.
I found this the most coherently written of the series, and comparing notes with a friend (who didn’t strictly agree with my conclusions but led me to better ones nonetheless), I think it’s down to genre. This is a book about a child having adventures with her weird friends, her weird family, and her world that’s falling apart; it’s framed and written like an adventure for a younger audience, though it is not. At one point Nona’s parents are saying something opaque about the worldbuilding, and Nona answers by summarizing what they said, in the form of a question, thus condensing and clarifying what was said—you know, like a book for younger readers would to ensure the plot point was understood. When did GT9 or HT9 hold the reader’s hand like that? It was kind of delightful to see the degree to which Muir trusts the reader rendered in such stark terms. In general I found events followed from each other more rationally than in previous books (with caveats; dual timeline notwithstanding, and also… significant portions of the second half of the book notwithstanding), and the writing was generally clearer because Nona *didn’t* have more information than the reader does, which was the main obstacle to clarity in HT9 especially. I noted in both my reads of Ht9 that the narrators understand their own world and so describe it in a way that feels opaque to a reader without access to that knowledge, those senses. Much of this book did not have that problem. It felt like a flex from Muir, like She Can Do Both. Reading this book reminded me of reading Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, which may as well have been crafted from cast-off material from this book.
The back half becomes less reader-friendly, even dragging in places once we return to the world that is the legacy of GT9 and HT9, and my rating fell because of it. One very spoilery element in particular really got my goat with its underexplanation, but I think it’ll matter a lot more in the next book so I’m willing to withhold judgment. So it's not like you're sailing through a world with perfectly rendered graphics all of a sudden; it's still a puzzlebox and leaves the reader doing a great deal of connecting their own dots, with dubious accuracy. I do recommend a reread of especially HT9 for anyone fuzzy on the details before diving in, because this book demands a lot of its reader’s ability to contextualize this book's events in the wider universe.
But ultimately: this book is about love, and I fucking loved it for that reason. It comes at it kind of sideways, and I think it’s easy to think “What’s the point?” of this book without conceiving of it as a response to key passages in the books that came before it. In HT9, Harrow is snuggling with her constant hallucination on the night before she thinks she’s going to die, and she is so desperate to feel loved, and her hallucination can’t give that to her. This whole book felt like a direct response to that heartbreaking scene. It felt like an exploration of the scene where Ortus says to Harrow in HT9, “I should have saved you; I was a grown man and you and Gideon were both children,” or when Harrow and John are talking about the tomb, and Harrow says, “I was 10 years old but I wasn’t a child.” This book is about a child who, unlike Harrow and Gideon, is well loved, for a time. As a secondary project, it is establishing worldbuilding details that will matter in the next book, and the priorities of this book do make it feel apart from the central plot. I don’t think it is. I think it is fundamental to the quartet in ways we don’t totally understand yet, but I have absolute faith that will become clear once we have all four books taken together. This book is not really “of” the world of Lyctors, but it is about the Nine Houses, and it is most certainly about Harrowhark. It’s an alternate history that is also real. In the end I think this will matter so, so much.
I will never read another series like this, and I will return to it again and again, probably next year. I cried many times reading this. Once again I didn’t love the ending and am critical of the structure, but it’s an experimental structural quartet and it unlocks shrimp emotions in me, so what can I really ask? What a wonderful feeling, to be critical of something and love it so much at the same time. If you got through Harrow, this is worth picking up.