This post is going to be full of spoilers about the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, so you should probably avoid it if you plan to read those books or have been convinced to read them by any of my past reviews. I’m not going to be actively discussing spoilers or the plot specifically, just my overall thoughts on the series so far, but I realized while writing my review of Nona The Ninth that I couldn’t really talk about what happened in it, much less my thoughts about how it related to the previous books, without basically spoiling everything. So, now that you’ve been warned, I’m going to get to the good stuff.

I didn’t really expect to find a series doing the whole “god and angels” thing, but I wound up there anyway. I might have realized it much sooner if I’d paid better attention to the names of the characters. I mean, I noted the name of the first protagonist, Gideon, as being religiously significant in multiple faiths but I read one of the other character’s name as HarrowHAWK instead of HarrowHARK and completely missed the fact that Harrowhark was supposed to be the messenger bearing tidings of a coming deific (or at least deific-adjacent) figure. I probably would have paid a bit more attention to all of the Locked Tomb references during the first book if I’d noticed that, too, which means it wouldn’t have caught me by surprise when that stuff became a major plot point in Harrow the Ninth. I needed quite a bit of time to adjust to what felt like the sudden intrusion of something that had been largely ignored during the first book when the second one started talking about this ghost and frozen girl and all that. Sure, that whole entire book threw me off because I was struggling with disassociation at the time and the second person narration was making it worse, but I would have picked up on the symbolism and larger narrative work happening if I’d noticed my reading mistake sooner than the penultimate chapter of the second book in the series. As it was, it radically changed my perspective in a way that made Nona the Ninth make a lot more sense when I started to pick up on the hints that Muir was putting down. I mean, it feels so clear in retrospect, given that Harrowhark paved the way for the return of a deific figure. It remains to be seen if that figure is properly deific, but I feel pretty confident making some Avenging Angel comparisons at the very least.

It’s also been fun dealing with an in-universe unreliable narrator. It was pretty clear from the middle of the first book that the god that everyone worshipped was up to something. The lack of complete information, the necromancy that somehow passed far beyond the abilities of the rest of the people in the known universe (at least initially, anyway), the strange and incoherent mystification of an ultimately mundane (but VERY murderous) force, and the way the characters slowly picked all of that apart (some much more quickly than others, admittedly). Plus, as someone raised Catholic and taught to never question authority, I recognize a confidence game run by an authority figure who finds it easier to come up with convincing lies than deal with people and all their messiness when I see one. This sense of an unreliable narrator becomes more pronounced in the second book, as we come face-to-face with this god. It took a while to be able to make sense of what was going on, though, since I struggled so much with the second person narration and was incredibly thrown off by how different our new protagonist, Harrowhark, seemed from the person she’d been in the first book. Eventually, though, it became clear that this god guy, John, was up to Some Shit. The difference in the way he spoke to the various people when he was alone with them and when he was in larger groups just screamed of a narcissist and manipulator. For good reason, given how much gaslighting he was doing. All of which was confirmed when it was revealed that he would step in to stop any of his current lyctors *cough cough* apostles *cough cough* from being killed by Harrowhark but not extend her the same protection.

In the third book, we start to get more of John’s story, relayed to an unnamed person who seems to be struggling with the strangeness of the world around them. It is unclear for a while whether these chapters, each of them titled as “John number: other number” like a verse from a bible, were flashbacks or merely shifts in perspective. While there isn’t a definite answer–since there are two possible people that he could have been talking to (and he could have told the story to both of them and just did the last part with the one we eventually see him with)–my bet is that he’s telling a story of a time he told a story since that many layers of removal seems to be his preferred level of distance from true information about himself. I think he told the story of his past and the last years of the humans as he rose to power to the woman he made out of the Earth’s soul and then relayed the story of that telling to whatever was left of Harrowhark as she found herself adrift while the soul of the Earth borrowed her body. Which is a huge convoluted situation, sure, but it gets there book-by-book and absolutely earns it, even if the end of Nona moves in and out of a level of abstraction that makes it difficult to follow the particulars. Or at least difficult to entirely trust them. But that’s the series’ charm, to be quite honest. It plays around with perspective, narrative voice, and the various persons seen as the protagonist more than any other series I’ve read. Sure, I definitely still think the second person narration in Harrow was a mistake and that it would have benefited from a bit more linearity in the timeline of events it shares with us, but I also still think its a good book. It swung for the fences and it landed in the outfield instead of being a homerun.

As we wait for the fourth (and final???) installment in the series, I’m really hoping that everyone is back in their rightful bodies, that all the conflicts of whose soul is in what body are resolved, and that we can get a deft weaving of dangling threads into one coherent narrative. I don’t expect every question I have to be answered (I’d be a little disappointed if they were, to be honest), but there’s so much going on that it seems almost impossible to weave it back together in a way that makes sense given how little sense so much of the series currently makes. I’m in a period of suspended disbelief for this series as a whole and I’d really like to find something that I can use to ground it all again in some way. The only reason I’m willing to give the story this much leeway is that it has been abundantly clear for a book and a half that all the characters in the books themselves also don’t understand what is actually going on. No one knows what is happening and everyone’s doing their best to figure it out as they go along. Anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something. The only person who might know is John, aka “god,” and I genuinely don’t think he knows as much as he thinks he does. He’s managed to luck his way into a whole lot of power and used it to kill every living thing he could get his magical paws on to make himself stronger. On one hand, you could argue that he doesn’t care enough to actually lie to people. On the other hand, as he says himself, he wanted to be loved like a god and that required a certain type of perfection that was incompatible with all of his horrendous fuckups, which is why he edited peoples’ memories when he brought them back to life. Just a colossal dillweed of a man.

I don’t really have a point I’m driving towards, to be honest. This is pretty much my entire reaction to where I’m at, knowledge-wise, on the series as a whole since I’ve mostly given up on book talks with other people. Most of the people I know who have read this series aren’t willing to engage with it on the level I’m interested in and while I have high hopes for one of my long-time friends (the woman who edits my fiction before I post it on this blog, in fact), she has a lot of stuff going on in her personal life right now so I am trying to avoid asking too much of her. I’ve told her about my posting plans (last week’s post and this week’s post, for the most part), so she might be reading these words right now and be preparing to text me so we can talk (this is getting a little meta even for me) but, for how popular this series is in a lot of the casual social circles I’m in, I don’t really expect to talk about it all that much. Still, I can’t wait to read the next book–reportedly titled Alecto the Ninth–so I can see what is going to come from all this excellent build up! There’s so much potential built into it all and I can’t wait to see it all unleashed.