After reading this, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to wait for the last book to come out. Although I think Harrow the Ninth was the best out of the three Locked Tomb books, Nona the Ninth was still so good, and I want to know how everything is going to unfold in the end.
Nona has a very different tone than the first two books, primarily because it’s following Nona, who could not be more different from both Gideon and Harrowhark. Although in an adult body, she is very childlike because she’s really only about 6 months old. She lives with Camilla, Palamedes (sort of), and Pyrrha and is believed by them to be one of two people (presumably either Harrow or Gideon), but she has no memories of her time before she lived with them. She is innocent and loving and just wants to fit in with her school friends. Meanwhile, Cam, Pal, and Pyrrha are working with Blood of Eden. The novel takes place over the course of 5 days “until the tomb opens” (not a spoiler – it says so on the start of the section entitled “Day One”). Interspersed throughout the novel are dreams of John and Harrow in which he tells her about what happened before the Resurrection (by the way – the numbers at the top of each of those sections are apparently a cypher that spell out something for readers).
I was less interested in Nona’s going to school and interacting with her peers than I was in the scenes that involved the adults, both in the main parts of the novel and in the dreams, because I really want to know more about what’s happening in the world and what happened before, during, and after the Resurrection. But I didn’t find those school sections uninteresting because they are so important to Nona. She wants to fit in with the “gang” led by Hot Sauce, and she takes pride in her role as teacher’s aid, especially since it means getting to walk a 6-legged dog named Noodle. In some ways, they are all very child-like with petty arguments and a tendency toward self-importance, but they also have to be somewhat mature because they are living on an unsafe planet crowded with refugees and threatened by a Resurrection Beast.
I loved Pyrrha, Cam, and Palamedes. They take care of each other and Nona and have become a family unit with clear bonds of affection between them. They each have distinct personalities, and I’m really not sure who I liked more, but Pyrrah probably edges out the rest. Plus there are interesting gender dynamics because she is living in Gideon the First’s body, so at least one minor character assumes she is male.
Muir continues her trend of keeping readers somewhat confused while slowly delivering pieces of the puzzle and then deluging you with a lot more information right at the end. It wasn’t as confusing as Harrow the Ninth, though I did still have to look up some answers to things I didn’t quite understand at the end. I really can’t wait for Alecto the Ninth and will probably even preorder it (once that’s even possible), which I very rarely do. The wait is excruciating!
cbr16bingo dreams – Nona keeps dreaming about a seemingly important woman, and Harrow and John are purportedly in a dream together.