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.
Continue readingNecromancy
Spoiler-Free Thoughts About Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
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.
Continue readingGideon The Ninth Was A Lark
Aside from one friend recommending a wide array of books, I’ve never really encountered anyone who has talked about why someone should read Gideon The Ninth or its sequels. Tons of people talked about those books, but it was mostly hidden behind spoiler tags, involved little more than invoking the jacket blurb describing it as “lesbian necromancers in space,” or was people parroting quotations back and forth that were lines removed from context that mostly weren’t spoilers. No one really talked about the book in a way that made it seem interesting or appealing to someone who hadn’t read it yet, just talking about various critical plot moments or theories about the upcoming third book instead of really trying to expand the web of people who’ve read it. I will be the first to admit that I probably need to find better sources for books and book-related discussions given how unreliable my casual discussion spheres appear to be, but I also felt like this had become an established series for a lot of people which made it fall into the “of course everyone knows about this and has read it” void. Aside from the one recommendation I’d gotten from a friend (which is ultimately what made me buy the book since I deeply trust her taste in books), it seemed like no one ever felt the need to suggest it to anyone.
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