Nona has the best life ever. Sure, she lives on a war-torn hellscape of a planet with a malevolent blue sphere hovering in the sky. And okay, she can’t remember anything further back than 6 months ago. And also, it sure seems like she’s some kind of inhuman, immortal entity somehow inhabiting the body of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. But Nona has a family that loves her. She has a group of friends to explore abandoned buildings with. Sometimes, she even gets to pet a 6-legged dog named Noodle. So life is pretty great.
Nona the Ninth is a major change of pace from the first two Locked Tomb books. After Gideon’s snarky bravado in Gideon the Ninth and Harrow’s descent into madness in Harrow the Ninth, it is refreshing to have a viewpoint character who is sunny and naive and simple. No bone-magic or death cults here; Nona just wants to pet dogs and have a birthday party. She is a delightful character and it is fascinating to look at this grim, terrifying world through her rose-colored glasses. Nona also seems to bring out new facets to established characters, for example, letting the reader see a more nurturing side of the badass cavalier Camilla Hect.
My main complaint about Nona the Ninth is in regard to the reading experience. Tamsyn Muir has a writing style where very little is ever directly explained; she puts a lot of trust in her readers to figure things out from context and put the pieces together on their own. In the first two books of this series, this meant I spent most of the book frustrated and confused, but this confusion just made the final resolution more satisfying. In Nona, I felt like I got all the confusion with none of the satisfaction. All kinds of mysteries and loose ends are brought up, and very few of them are resolved or explained by the end. It just felt like an incomplete book. All in all, though, I enjoyed Nona and can’t wait for the series to finish up with Alecto the Ninth.