WHO IS E WHO IS E OH WHAT THE FUCK WHO IS E
Nothing gets me on my crazy Catholic bullshit like a new Tamsyn Muir book. When I finally (FINALLY) got my hands on Nona the Ninth, after ten thousand (fact check: two) years of pining for it, I curled up on my sofa with it and my Bible and unfortunately no wine because I was on a clean living kick, and read it and thought of tweets like “New Revised Standard Version in the streets, King James Version in the sheets”, a tweet you were only spared because I couldn’t stop reading Nona the Ninth long enough to write it.
One fact about the Locked Tomb trilogy is that any man who falls behind is left behind; by which I mean that it is impossible to describe the events of this book to someone who has not read the prior two books. I know this to be true because I have read Harrow the Ninth eleventy-thousand times, and I have even written a blog post that tiresomely explicates its references to memes and Bible verses, yet when I picked up Nona the Ninth and flipped to the end to check how things were going for certain parties, the pages that I read were goddamn gibberish. I remember this from getting the ARC of Harrow the Ninth. Here was I, all determined to discover what was going to happen, and here was the end of Harrow the Ninth like “and then Mercymorn exploded, and some sunglasses, and we went under the River, and there was a Body GOOD LUCK BITCH.”
I love it here; I love everyone in this bar.
Thirty seconds after I had finished reading Nona the Ninth, I handed my copy to my mother. She said, “Were any of our theories right?” and I just stared at her with unseeing eyes like a necromancer whose blindness may or may not have protected her from the blue madness wrought by Varun the Eater (Number Seven). She said, patiently, “Who did Nona turn out to be?” and my facial expression did not alter because the fuck do I know. (I think I do know. But I am not confident.) It’s like when the first of my Twitter mutuals copped to having read Harrow the Ninth, way back in the innocent time before the plague, and I immediately DMed them to demand they tell me if Gideon was alive, and they were all like, “S…ort of? Yes? Or, maybe?”
If this makes it sound like Tamsyn Muir continues to be coy with the giving out of answers, that is an accurate takeaway. Or to put it another way, Tamsyn Muir has this uncanny knack for letting loose an avalanche of answers, at the end of which you have ten thousand more questions than you had in the first place. Of those, the one I have been shrieking most loudly at my friends-and-relations (who bear it very patiently, considering) is WHO THE ABSOLUTE ENTIRE LIVING FUCK IS E!!!! (I refuse to inquire if Gideon and Harrow are going to be reunited and okay. Of course they are going to be reunited and okay. They might both be dead; I am not sure; it does not affect my belief in their future happiness. I did a little Tarot spread for them, and the outcome card was the Six of Wands, so things are going to be fine.)
“Jenny please just tell us what the book is about.” Yes, okay. Sorry. So the book is about a girl called Nona, who only attained consciousness a short while ago, and who is living inside a body that doesn’t seem to be hers. She lives with Pyrrha (I love Pyrrha so much) and Camilla, who sometimes is Palamedes, and she goes to a school where she has a little gang of friends who are children. This is good for Nona because although she seems to be nineteenish, she is in many ways a child too. She can’t read, but she can speak every language. She loves everyone in her life, including and especially her teacher’s little dog Noodle. She and her little family are in constant danger from threats that include the armies of the Nine Houses, a Resurrection Beast in ?orbit?? or something? over their planet, and various Blood of Eden factions.
If I am absolutely honest, I have to confess that Nona is not quite my thing, as a character. Obviously she’s a good girl, and she cares about her people and she cares about Noodle, and that’s all well and good. But if I am anything, I am a second-book-in-the-trilogy bitch all the way up to my eyeballs, and if I am anything else, I am soft for a Shuos Jedao / Captain Flint type, and what I am saying is that Harrowhark Nonagesimus was always going to be the narrator of my heart. Good though Nona is, she was the least interesting character in her book, partly because everyone else has more information than she does, and I — frustratingly — had access to very little of it.
That said, Nona the Ninth is a banner book for fans of the Sixth House. If ever you have wished that fiction would give more space to best friendship (as opposed to, for instance, romance) between men and women, I believe that you will enjoy the whole arc that Palamedes and Camilla undergo, except uhhhhh possibly for one thing towards the end that I do not myself know quite how to feel about so I guess I’ll have to wait until Alecto the Ninth comes out to make a decision on that.
Major spoilers in this paragraph: When I was listing my hopes and dreams for the Locked Tomb trilogy, I said that I wanted a really really good Palamedes and Camilla reunion. Here is what I have learned, friends: Tamsyn Muir may give you what you said you wanted, but whatever the case, she will find a way to inflict the maximum amount of psychic damage on you as she goes. Before Nona came out, I spoke to a friend who was rereading Gideon, and they were like, “Can you imagine Crux’s face if he ever found out Gideon was God’s daughter? Like, I know that could never happen, but can you imagine?” and I was all “wow yeah that would be satisfying,” but secretly inside my own heart I was thinking, “It will not be satisfying and you will be devastated.” Anyway that was a very charming thing that happened to me, and I wanted to share it. Hopefully my friend was able to derive satisfaction from Gideon’s very spot-on burn of how badly Crux fucked up both her and Harrow. I certainly enjoyed it. I am very much in the tank for Gideon and Harrow’s devotion to each other, and it sends a zing of pleasure up my spine any time one of them heatedly defends the other. They’re so in love! They’re such good girls! I love them!
In interstitial chapters, John is explaining to Harrow — but he doesn’t really really seem to be talking to Harrow — what he did and why things are like this. You do not discover answers to questions like “is Harrow alive” or “where did necromancy come from really” but you do discover answers to questions like “why does nobody ever talk about Ulysses and Titania” and “is it chill and fine to turn cows inside out, or will people get upset” and “how soon did people start correctly identifying that John is a fucking cult leader.” There is also the creepiest possible scene which I will share here for extensive discussion in the comments:
He was scooping indentations in the sand, making big, print-block child’s letters with the tip of his forefinger. As she watched, he made a pothook–J–then the finned spine of E. He wiped that E clean, and replaced it with A. He wiped that clean, and he drew the prison bars of H. This J and H he barred around with an uneven heart.
Just a few quick follow-up Qs:
- What?
- How is John so altogether fucking creepy?
- J is John and H is Harrow and A is Alecto, so who the shit is E?
- What?
Implied major spoilers in this paragraph: I had a dream in graphic novel form about some Catholic teenagers ruining one another’s lives, and in the dream one of the Catholic teenagers was reading Nona the Ninth and she looked up from the ?page? (idk she was a pen and ink drawing, I don’t think there even was a page, it was a weird dream) and said, “Is E the Earth?” and now I can’t stop thinking about that. E is the Earth, right? Alecto’s the Earth? And if I may, how many fucking times has John rebuilt all his fucking friends? Please discuss in the comments. I am troubled by the implication that a) they possibly may have had different names the first time around; and b) John resurrected them after killing them; and c) it is not outside the realm of possibility that John has done this more than once. Eeeeeeuuuuurrrrrrrgggghhhh.
Have you read Nona yet? Did you love it? Do you have theories you wish to share in the comments?