Monday, November 28, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

 

Nona the Ninth is the third book in Tamsyn Muir's "The Locked Tomb" series, which burst onto the scene a few years back with Gideon the Ninth to both critical and popular acclaim. My feelings on the series are a bit more mixed - I very much enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, with its Lesbian Necromancers in Space concept, locked room mystery, and sarcastic backtalking heroine, but despite all that found that the setting of the story was kind of barebones. This became a problem for me in the second book, Harrow the Ninth, which cultivated mystery upon mystery that I just couldn't find it in myself to care about, as it relied upon aspects of the setting and other characters who were never really explored...and never really provided much answers to grab onto. It doesn't help that my fast reading style apparently missed quite a bit of context that as put into the margins, as I've found out since from looking at Harrow's wikipedia and tvtropes pages.

Still, I was willing to give book 3 a try, and I found myself actually liking Nona the Ninth. This book was not originally planned - it was apparently part 1 of what was originally a trilogy's finale (Alecto the Ninth) before it was spun off into its own book after it got too long and substantive on its own merit. And despite that, it feels like a complete book, not half of one, and its main character - while very different from prior protagonists Gideon and Harrow - is really enjoyable, as an optimistic 19 year old girl without memories of who she is and a bright disposition in a world going to hell around her. The story still has issues of way too many mysteries going on, not all of which I cared about, but actually provides some answers finally to ground the setting, something I have been missing for 3 books now. The result will definitely please anyone who loved the first two books, and if you were on the fence about continuing like me, I do think Nona is worth a try.

-------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------

Nona doesn't remember anything beyond a few months ago, when she awoke in her 19-year old body under the care of her three minders - Pyrrha, Camilla and Palamedes, with the latter two splitting time in the same body. She also understands seemingly only a little about the world they all live on, a world bathed in blue light by a strange blue sphere in the sky, where zombies are hold up somewhere nearby and threaten the populace from the stars, and a resistance movement finds itself torn between internal dissent - a resistance movement that has increasing interest in Nona and her guardians.

No, Nona doesn't care about that - Nona just wants to enjoy life as she has it, to make her guardians proud, and to enjoy her job as a Teacher's aid at the local school, where the oddball teens there have all basically adopted her as one of their own. She loves the kids, her guardians, the dogs (especially the dogs), and even the resistance leaders and personnel, and wants them to love her.

But Nona has strange dreams, dreams of another person with a skull painted face, and of being someone else entirely. And so she knows deep down that it won't last forever, and that soon the answer of who Nona is will change everything...even if she doesn't want it to.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nona the Ninth shares some things with its predecessors: like both books it features the first person perspective of a strong well established protagonist, and like Harrow it features chapters interspersed within that come from another narrative, this time the story of the God Emperor John Gaius telling of how things came to be, with this narrative taking place on what is recognizably our own Earth in its last days before the end (and thus finally providing answers about much of the setting). But the bulk of the book follows Nona, as she goes about her life, and how that life is interrupted by the events and characters of the series getting up to their own schemes and events around her.

And Nona is a really well done and super lovable character - she's more understanding and knowledgable that people think, even if she doesn't quite always put together what's going on around her (although much of this is denial for her own sake), and she's just got this insane optimism towards everyone and everything, to the extent where the Dramatis Personae is her list of invites for a birthday party, which includes the various members of the Resistance movement Blood of Eden. Through that narrative, and that ignorance and lack of knowledge of who some people actually are (but whom the reader will recognize as their traits become inevitable), we see a story of this bright young girl (she's 19 but essentially has the mentality of a girl even if she's aware of things like sex and whatnot) as the world just doesn't let her be and enjoy things because it has bigger plans for her....just like it did everyone else in this world (and sometimes in our world). It's a pureness and optimism that is just a joy to read and it makes nona easy to care for and feel for, even without the sarcastic cynical wit that has previously populated this series from its main characters

Which is not to say we don't get some of that wit from the side characters - of whom there are many both old and new, and largely with the old characters taking new forms and identities that represent changes in their acts. And this balance of optimism with grit, cynicism, sarcasm - and with the secondary narrative's near future SF cynical biased telling - works really well together to make Nona the Ninth kind of a joy to read. And there's of course still serious themes here about fighting for justice, for revenge, for righting historical wrongs, grief and love, and for the evils of selfishness and Empire and Greed in general. More importantly, Nona the Ninth provides us with actual answers, both in its secondary narrative - which FINALLY provides us with a better explanation of the setting so as to make it all make any sense - and its primary narrative, which takes place pretty much entirely outside the Nine Houses which we've thought of as our whole world from the beginning.

The result largely made me feel more justified in continuing this series, even if it still has a few of the older books' problems for me: some of the reveals are done in such a way (for example, another use of Second Person) that I still kind of needed to check TV Tropes to recognize what exactly those reveals really meant, and the last chapter epilogue is written in such a style I had to reread it a few times just to confirm what had happened. Again obviously this was less of a problem for other more detailed readers than me in the past, but if you're like me and had such issues with the prior books, they're still a problem here. And of course this book ends with a cliffhanger, given that it is half of what was intended to be the original final book in the trilogy.

But it's a cliffhanger that is still satisfying to read, so I can't complain too much. All in All, this isn't a series that's truly wowing me like it is others, but it's still enjoyable and I will be reading through the conclusion.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)