I’ve finally read Nona the Ninth, thereby completing as much of the Locked Tomb series (by Tamsyn Muir) as has been released. This one was SO MUCH easier to read than the last one, Harrow the Ninth since it wasn’t in second-person almost the entire time. This one stayed with one very limited and skewed perspective, but it was consistent and easy enough to figure out as I read. While there were definitely points where I struggled, it had more to do with getting into the right frame of mind than about the craft of the novel. There were also a few points where I felt a bit confused, but they were all clearly a design choice by Muir, meant to reflect the state of the protagonist. The story did a great job of laying things out, avoiding the timeline foibles of Harrow as well as the second-person narration ones, and I probably enjoyed this one the most in the series thus far. I’m incredibly interested to see where things go in the next book, as the Locked Tomb series draws to what seems like the close of this once-trilogy, and as all the things set up in Nona and the previous volumes finally pay off. There’s so much that got expanded upon or accentuated in Nona that I’m feeling almost rabid for the next volume and find myself feeling incredibly grateful that I’ve only come upon the series during what is supposed to be the year of the fourth book’s release.

We get a very interesting view of the world from our narrator since she, the titular Nona, is an incredibly young person despite the apparent age of her body. While the book takes a long time to tell the reader what happened to the body’s previous occupant(s), there are plenty of hints about what is going on that are delivered through the way Nona views the world, the people around her, and the things she must do from one day to the next. Perhaps most interesting is her ability to understand the people she interacts with. She is able to read them like a book, understanding not just the words coming out of their mouths no matter what language they’re speaking, but their body language and their intent as well. There are many times she is used as a lie detector by the people caring for and protecting her since they all seem to recognize her ability to see to the heart of people almost instantly for everyone but a couple of the most guarded and closed-off people (and those heavily obscuring their features and bodies). This means that, as we are in a world where someone’s gender might not match how society might label them based on their appearance, we find her frequently correcting people who misgender those around them, perhaps most frequently with one of her companions, a pair of people who have a time share on a body. Almost no one but Nona can tell merely by looking at the body which person is inhabiting it, but Nona can tell immediately and usually lets others know by correcting the pronouns and gendered language used in reference to the person currently inhabiting the body.

To be honest, it’s all a bit hard to describe without massively spoiling both Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, so I’ll have to leave those convoluted and rather empty details as they are so you can take the time to go read those books if you haven’t. After all, most of my problems with Harrow are the result of a personal distaste for second-person narration, heightened at the time of reading by a moderate amount of disassociation that was made worse by the seemingly self-referential reading I was doing. If there was ever a third-person edit of the book, I’d probably read it and enjoy it far more, even though that would either be giving away the twist or turning it from something deftly foreshadowed into something that came out of nowhere. Still, I think its worth the read if you can handle second-person narration better than I can. Or maybe in audiobook format. It might be easier to handle if I wasn’t hearing it in my own internal voice.

Anyway, I really don’t think I can talk about any of the specifics of this book without spoiling stuff from the two prequels, so I might have to leave it here with the thought that I appreciated this one most of all because the protagonist viewed gender the way I default to viewing it. It’s not something necessarily attached to biology or appearance, no matter how one might choose to look. After all, I’m incredibly masculine-presenting and identify about as far from that as a person can get without getting into femininity, so I’m incredibly mentally prepared to attach gender to the way a person wishes to be seen rather than the way they look. Which feels a little contradictory but, if this doesn’t make sense to you, I suggest reading Nona so you can get a handle on what I’m talking about. Once I’ve had a little bit more time to think (and figured out how long I’ll have to wait for the next book in the series), I’ll write a spoiler-filled review of Nona the Ninth so I can really dig into what I think of the series as a whole and the story being told, especially now that I realized one of the characters is named HarrowHARK not HarrowHAWK. Missing this incredibly significant difference really threw me off the trail that Muir was trying to lead me down until literally the second-to-last chapter of Harrow the Ninth. Yeah, it’s my fault for not reading the name closely enough, but the books also didn’t help since almost everyone calls her something other than her full name most of the time. Which, you know, is fair. I’d call it an eighty/twenty split on whose fault it is, so it’s not like I’m REALLY blaming the book. It’s mostly my own dang fault.