Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby felt terrifyingly topical when I read it in January of this year, and then it just got more and more and more topical somehow. It’s about two Black siblings, Ella and Kev, who each have special powers. Jumping around in time, Riot Baby shows us a dystopian America that’s functionally just… America, and Kev ends up incarcerated for living in the world while Black. Using their powers, Ella and Kev pay telepathic (?) visits to each other, as well as to a number of scenes in America’s racist history, and search for ways to bring the whole racist system down.

Tor’s novella line continues to publish absolute bangers, and Riot Baby felt like a gift in a year when America has felt even more like a dystopia than usual. Its leaps through time are deliberately disorienting, so that the reader is never quite allowed to settle into any certainty about what the book is going to be. Instead you’re carried through time and space in a sort of grand tour of American oppression. Riot Baby is imaginative, strange, dizzying, exhilarating.

Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai

I can’t remember who recommended Butterfly Yellow to me, but it was this wonderfully quiet and careful YA novel about a Vietnamese girl who comes to America in search of her little brother, from whom she was separated during the Vietnam War. She’s certain that he’ll be delighted to be reunited with her, but instead she finds that he’s comfortable in his new life with his adoptive parents. Hằng befriends a cowboy named LeeRoy and sticks around, patiently trying to rebuilt her relationship with her brother.

Because we see Hằng so much through LeeRoy’s eyes, I kept thinking that she was younger than she was, so it threw me off a bit when she develops a romance with LeeRoy. And overall I think Butterfly Yellow feels slightly more middle grade than YA. Aside from that small area of disorientation, though, it was a book with a great deal of emotional depth. No matter how much we want easy answers, such answers aren’t forthcoming. Instead, it’s a story about perseverance in love and finding joy in an imperfect world.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

On a grim day in January, I opened my mail to find an ARC of Harrow the Ninth, upon which I shrieked like a banshee and dived into it with an enthusiasm. Gideon the Ninth, you’ll recall, was the lesbian necromancers in space book, and this is the middle book in the series. We follow Harrow as she struggles with her imperfect Lyctorhood and her fractured memories of what happened at Canaan House.

This book is bonkers. It is bonkers. Every choice that Tamsyn Muir makes in this book is bonkers. It is a symphony of what-the-fuck, with every instrument playing a perfect, terrifying what the fuck variation, and all I could do was let myself be swept along by it. I know that some folks have said they found this one a harder read than Gideon — in Gideon the Ninth you’re in Gideon’s head enjoying her irreverent take on all the horrifying blood and murder events, whereas in Harrow the Ninth you’re living with Harrow’s rage, grief, and self-loathing. So I hope it won’t make me sound like a callous monster when I say I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I was grinning from ear to ear every time I opened it. I cannot wait for the third one.

Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

WHEW did somebody say “mastery of the novella form”? I got Empress of Salt and Fortune as an ARC and was not immediately sucked in after reading the first few pages. Then on a Saturday I was like “I’m going to dedicate some actual time to reading this bastard” and sat down and read it all in one sitting. It’s the story of cleric Chih, who is collecting stories on their travels through a country that has been shaped by a powerful empress. They encounter an old woman who used to serve in the royal palace, and settle in to hear her version of the empress’s rise.

Just, wow. I absolutely loved this book. I am not one for secondary world fantasy, usually, but Vo builds her world around material culture: the tooth that was part of the gown the empress wore when she came as a bride to the palace; the dice that she used to play games and cast lots; a map of pilgrimage shrines throughout the empire. The things are the hook into the story of this empress, and the story is about women’s rage. It’s about the refusal to accept the oppression and denial your life has given you, and the overlooked ways women use to communicate among themselves, using tools that powerful men can’t be bothered glancing at twice.

I still don’t quite know how Vo managed to pack so much worldbuilding, emotion, and plot into 118 pages, but I do know that I’m excited for her future career and inevitable superstardom in the world of SFF.

The Good Luck Girls, Charlotte Nicole Davis

ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE YA!!!

Every year for the last few years, there’s been at least one YA novel where I was like “this is just a good fucking adventure story, what a pleasure, what a dream,” and as I look back on them, they are all, one hundred percent of them, road trip adventures. So in case there was any lack of clarity about what I like and whether I am predictable, the answers are road trips and yes, I am very predictable.

The Good Luck Girls tells the story of a group of girls fleeing from the brothel to which they were sold as children, trying to escape the consequences of a patron’s death. They are seeking asylum in a place they’ve only heard about, a place that for all they know doesn’t even exist — but they have to try and get there, or else resign themselves to spending their lives being hunted by the raveners who have been tasked with finding them and punishing them.

As dark as this premise is, Davis does a terrific job of writing a book that doesn’t feel doomed, yet also doesn’t gloss over the genuine trauma these girls have been through in their lives. Aster is determined to get all her friends to safety, whatever the cost to her; she’s smart and resourceful and angry and driven, and I cherished her. There’s a slow build-up of grudging respect between her and the house favorite at their brothel, Violet, which of course I adored, and the stakes of their road trip escape remain high, high, high, so there’s this lovely release of tension any time they have the chance to stop and rest and be happy for even a short time. And the set-up for book two just really thrilled me. Can’t wait for more!

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Whoever decided to get Paul Lewin to do the cover for this book deserves a trophy. Also, I love Paul Lewin’s art. One of my goals for this year is to read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, not just because I need to read more of Octavia Butler’s work, but also because if I like it then I can maybe buy the editions that feature Paul Lewin’s fancy, gorgeous covers.

Anyway, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games digs deep into major fantasy properties to explore the ways Black characters in those franchises have been used and abused by both the stories themselves and the audiences who received them. Thomas is a terrific, insightful cultural critic, and her work is particularly notable for how clearly she loves these properties and wants better for them. Her readings of the texts and their audiences enriched my understanding of these books, movies, and TV shows, and I’m so excited for whatever this author plans to do next.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Anne Carson

Before *waves hands* all this, I attended a conference at which New Directions had a booth, and you just wouldn’t believe the shriek of joy I emitted when I realized that Anne Carson had a new book. Anne Carson is the translator, poet, and genius behind If Not, Winter (an amazing translation of Sappho) and Nox, a book-in-a-box I incepted myself into being able to afford the first year I lived in New York.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy combines the story of Helen of Troy with the life of Marilyn Monroe, whose name before fame was Norma Jeane Baker. It’s expectedly strange and funny and devastating.

In ancient Greece you use the verb [I am too lazy to recreate this in WordPress], which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

Anne Carson is a queen on etymology. If you liked the above quotation, I refer you to Nox, which does a lot of this kind of thing.

Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Remember when I was lowkey obsessed with Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri’s debut? Well, in an exciting twist, I loved Realm of Ash even more. It maintains the same Angry Girl / Soft Boy romance dynamic, but dials the anger and the softness up by several notches.

Even saying that feels like a disservice to Realm of Ash, because it ignores the absolutely wonderful worldbuilding and plot work that Tasha Suri is doing. It’s the kind of sequel that Diana Wynne Jones would write, where the book is set in the same world under (some of) the same set of assumptions, but it’s far more of a companion novel than the type of sequel where you’re like, aw, yeah, gonna get some answers now. Realm of Ash is about the crumbling Ambhan Empire, and the efforts of a widow and a prince to understand the limits of their forbidden magic.

I just… I loved this? Again I say that I tend to struggle with secondary world fantasy, but authors like Tasha Suri and Nghi Vo seem determined to undermine my carefully established opinions. Tasha Suri comes out of fanfic, and you can really tell by the way she makes relationships so central to her plotting. I loved this book, and I cannot wait for Suri’s 2021 book The Jasmine Throne. I love her.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

This round-up includes three nonfiction books (unless you count the book of poetry; in which case, four), and I stand by all of them. Because Internet is a linguistics book about the language of the internet, and it’s 24-karat gold in my opinion. Gretchen McCulloch talks about all the things you’d expect, like the development of emojis and the reason why memes work or don’t, as well as a whole slew of things you wouldn’t, like how Arabic-speakers convey the Arabic alphabet on Twitter and why old people use so many ellipses in their emails.

If you’ve ever been like “I am extremely online, but why?”, I highly recommend that you read Because Internet. It won’t explain why you are so online (who could?), but it will describe your life in terrifyingly accurate terms.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

I could just as well have put The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on this list, because Zen Cho blessed us with two new releases in the last two years, but The True Queen was the one that I really loved. This may reflect my general preference for the novel-length format. The True Queen is a follow-up to the 2015 Sorcerer to the Crown, and I loved it so so so so so much. It’s set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, as Sorcerer to the Crown was, but it focuses much more on people who aren’t English. Yay!

I love Zen Cho for so consistently writing books that could have been dark and grim but are, in fact, funny and light-hearted. In these quarantimes, it feels like a particularly revolutionary writing choice. The True Queen deals with a lot of heavy themes (imperialism, family conflict, etc.) in a way that isn’t too grim but also doesn’t feel like a cop-out by the author. I just truly loved this book, as I have all her books to date. I had so much fucking fun reading it, and in a year where fun was few and far between, I value that so so so much. ZEN CHO.

The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Yes, I was furious at the offhand way in which NK Jemisin dismissed New Orleans in this book, and yes, it made me cry on podcast. But apart from that gripe, which while not minor to me was minor in terms of the space it occupied in the book, I really loved NK Jemisin’s latest novel. It’s about the city of New York becoming sentient, manifesting itself in the avatars for each borough, who must come together to fight against an evil white Lovecraftian tentacle creature.

In perhaps the clearest measure of success, The City We Became made me feel agonizingly homesick for New York City. I was supposed to visit it in 2020! Reading this reminded me so keenly of what the city is like, in all its boroughs, in every iteration, and I just got really fucking emoshe about it. NK Jemisin’s writing is typically beautiful, her plotting typically tense, and I was left with a mighty yearning for more of this series.

A Song Below Water, Bethany Morrow

It’s the misogynoir fantasy novel of your dreams! Tavia has known for years that she’s a siren, and she knows that she must be careful never to reveal what she is. Living in the city of Portland, she has plenty of opportunity to see the kind of oppression faced by other Black people, especially Black women, especially sirens. In the aftermath of a siren murder trial, Tavia learns that an idol of hers is also a siren, and she begins to understand that she has no alternative but to use her voice to pursue her values.

I loved the worldbuilding in A Song Below Water, and I dearly hope that Bethany Morrow has plans for more books in this universe. Though Tavia struggles mightily with understanding what it means to be a siren, sirens are not the only magical being in this world. I would love to see books that deal with other kinds of magic and their implications — not least because Tavia’s beloved sister Effie has secrets of her own that are uncovered in the course of the novel. I love sister stuff! I love it! And this book is about sisters who are absolutely ride-or-die for each other, which was great to see — I love a complicated sibling relationship, but I also love the kind of relationship that’s all about love and loyalty.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Mirabile, Janet Kagan

Okay, I confess that this one’s on me. My aunt has been trying to get me to read Mirabile for, like, six years, and every time I was like “oh yeah yeah I’ll get to it for sure” and then because I couldn’t easily access the book, I did not for sure get to it. Last year, my aunt totally got me by just lending me the mf book, so it was either I read it promptly or I became one of those people who borrows a book and never remembers to return it. And y’all know I refuse to be that person.

Mirabile, which was published in 1991, is about xenobiologist (?) / xenoecologist (??) Mama Jason, who is responsible for researching and keeping under control the many mutant life forms that inevitably arise on the planet colony of Mirabile. This is a novel in stories (not usually my favorite thing), most of which were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction before being collected in novel form, and each chapter deals with a specific life form, from the Kangaroo Rex to the Loch Moose Monster. It’s the kind of low-stakes SFF novel that I’m constantly searching for: Though Mama Jason is tasked in some ways with the survival of the colony, there’s never any real question that she’ll succeed in her endeavors. She has a funny, wry narrative voice, and it’s overall just great to see an older woman protagonist in SF. My aunt was right. I should have read this sooner.

Part two is coming your way soon! Probably!

The post All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1 appeared first on Reading the End.

There are going to be oblique and explicit spoilers in this post, so do not read it if you mind being spoiled! Also, please hop into the comments to chat with me about the conversation God and Harrow have in chapter 14, because I have… some ideas about it.

“I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” [Ianthe] said. “Choke me, Daddy.” (p. 16)

It’s a meme!

“Each time, the news that you have not spent your life in acquiring martial virtues comes as a little less of a shock to me. But have a go. Surprise me. My body is ready.” (p. 21)

(thanks to dreadhorse actually for this one!)

“My body is ready” is also a meme! I am most familiar with it with the gif of Snape, but your mileage may very.

[Ianthe] said, “Well, I tried, and therefore no one should criticize me,” before ducking through the arch to the foyer beyond (p. 16-17).

I guess theoretically this is a reference to an SNL skit Dan Radcliffe was in, but as an extremely online person myself, I am prepared to state with optimistic confidence that it’s mainly just a reference to the relevant reaction gif.

“And what has a soul?”

You weren’t going to last the distance. The questions were beginning to sound stupid, or sophistic. The Body watched you with careful, filmy eyes. “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to… have a soul. So, humanity.”

The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.” (p.40)

This is one of the ones I had to look up! The italicized bits are from “The Little Mermaid,” by Hans Christian Anderson, and it occurs during a conversation the little mermaid is having with her grandmother, in which the grandmother tells her how she could get a soul, which mermaids don’t currently have:

“Only if a human loved you so much that you meant more to him than father and mother. If he were to love you with all his heart and soul and let the priest place his right hand in yours as a promise to be faithful and true here and in all eternity — then his soul would glide in your body and you, too, would obtain a share of human happiness. He would give you a soul and yet keep his own. But that can never happen.”

I don’t really have any conclusions to draw from this, but it’s thematically interesting!

“And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet–” (p. 42)

Macbeth shout-out? I’m unsure. However, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” is a line that occurs when our hero thinks he’s completely safe, and then someone he’s written off as a threat kills him dead.

“What’s more, now we are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field, et cetera, so I’ll thank you to not embark on the I have been hard done by act.” (p. 63)

Never don’t have a Casablanca reference if life offers you the opportunity to have a Casablanca reference!

She hoped he never finished it. She hoped there was never world enough or time. (p. 71)

“Had we but world enough and time” is the first and most famous line of Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.”

“And you, you Ninth House child, are not remotely qualified to fight an outside predator. You are like a little baby.” (p.98)

ETA: Will Sargent notes that this is a reference to the Layers of Irony meme. Check out the comments for additional suspected video game references by Will — I haven’t included them in the list because they are in games so I can’t verify them and they aren’t specific page-numbered textual references to identify. Which is very annoying for me! I apologize for not being a video games person and being unable to check these. My failings are many.

You found yourself saying, “Someone’s crying, Lord,” but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise. (p.104)

Is this a “Kumbaya” reference?? Feels like it.

You said, “A Seventh House flaw. A fatal longing for the picturesque.” (p.155)

When I tell you I screamed. This is from The Secret History, my beloved The Secret History!

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

It’s the first paragraph of the first chapter of The Secret History. Bless Tamsyn Muir.

“Blood of Eden,” he’d said slowly.

“Who is Eden?”

“Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera… Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no right to act as though you own it.” (p. 159)

The line from King Lear is: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!”

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS. Who’s the thankless child in this scenario? Is Eden the parent, and Blood of Eden is the thankless child to Eden? Is Eden the thankless child of God?

“We’re puppies, you and I: I with my lame paw, and you with three legs missing insisting you can make it on your own. And God help us both, because we are surrounded by wolves.” (p.170)

ETA: ten_tangents notes that this is a reference to Li’l Brudder, the name of a one-legged puppy that Strong Bad uses to make people cry.

“Here, I’m going to pretend to read this one off my tablet, when in fact it’s been with me for over ten thousand years. Here’s my favorite part…”

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. (p. 196)

“Annabel Lee” is a beautiful, lulling, creepy poem by Edgar Allan Poe about a dead girl in a tomb. It notably contains the line “And neither the angels in Heaven above / Nor the demons down under the sea [!!!!] / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul [!] / of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”

ETA: Long after writing this post, I remembered that in Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert refers to his first love (a girl he knew in adolescence, who died of typhus) as Annabel Leigh. In the book, he claims that his sexual and romantic interest in young girls is a result of his love for Annabel and the trauma of her early death. If Tamsyn Muir is doing this allusion on purpose, it’s very fucking effective. I got an absolute shiver when I thought of it. John is so sinister.

(Here’s something Humbert says about Annabel, presented without comment: “That frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh.”)

“It is a drawing of the letter S,” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.” (p. 205)

Okay, I can’t swear to it, but I think this is a reference to that weird letter S you used to doodle on all your homework pages. I don’t actually know how to google for that item, so I have just done one and photographed it. You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about once you see it.

“Never mind that. Was he actually…?” (Here she made an evil gesture with her hands, which you took a moment to comprehend. “You know. Waxing necrolagnic? Committing the love that cannot speak its name?” (p. 216-17)

Ugh this is a reference to that poem by Oscar Wilde’s horrible boyfriend Bosie, ugh. You can read it if you want. Fuckin Bosie.

Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds!” (p. 257)

Leibniz, a philosopher, came up with the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, ipso facto, because if God is able to create anything, and God chose to create this specific universe, then God did so because this specific universe is the best of all possible worlds. It’s a very well things could be worse solution to the problem of evil. Thanks for nothing, Leibniz. YES I INCLUDE CALCULUS IN THAT.

(Ugh, no, fine, okay, thanks for calculus I guess, Leibniz.)

ETA: Jeanne and Sparrow both identified that Voltaire’s Candide (which I haven’t read!) makes fun of the concept of “the best of all possible worlds,” and suggested that this passage aligns the Lyctors with the kind of naivete and ignorance of broader context that Voltaire is critiquing in Candide.

[Augustine] looked at you, and relieved your mind by not kissing you anywhere; he simply raised his eyebrows and said, “And so the crow can be a swan!” (p.267)

Romeo and Juliet reference — Benvolio says to Romeo, “Compare her face with some that I will show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.”

PS Augustine is so rude!

“Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.) (p. 268)

This isn’t a reference to anything, but since I missed the joke on the first two readings of Harrow, I wanted to flag it for y’all. He’s not saying Ortus, he’s saying Gideon. When I want Gideon to go, he’ll be giddy-gone. Get it? Ha!

“Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”

He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.” (p. 269)

I resent Dios apate for being Greek and not Latin, which meant I had to google it instead of knowing it in my very bones. Anyway, it means “deception of God” and it’s a reference to a thing that happens in Book XIV of the Iliad, where Hera sneakily gets various gods to help her seduce Zeus until he falls asleep, giving Poseidon the opening he needs to help the Greeks succeed in battle against the Trojans. Amusingly she performs the seduction on Mount Ida! (Ianthe is the Princess of Ida, in case anyone has forgotten that detail.)

“The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.” (p. 306)

This is a call-out to the Gospel of, ironically, John (John 20), and the saddest line in it or, possibly, any other book. It’s so fucking desolate. The line actually occurs twice: Mary Magdalene first notices that Jesus’s body is gone from the tomb (the rock has been rolled away, incidentally) and tells the other disciples:

Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.

Then the disciples all go home, except for Mary Magdalene, who hangs around the tomb crying. Then these two angels show up, and the line occurs a second time, but sadder:

And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

Oh, Camilla.

“It’s a Resurrection Beast, honey! Thank you! Next!!” (p. 335)

The Ariana Grande song!

ETA: Finn has pointed out that the number of exclamation points after “Next!!” make it near-certain that this is a reference to “Next!!” lady. Even better, honestly.

These next two are on the same page, which I think is truly and magnificently emblematic of the high/low culture shit that Tamsyn Muir pulls.

And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light. (p. 344)

Being Catholic, I of course do not know Bible things, but I do know Latin and church songs! This translates: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom will I fear?” and it’s the first line of Psalm 27.

On the previous page, God actually says the whole thing in English: “I am your salvation and your light. Who should I fear?” And incidentally, in the climactic scene, Augustine calls it back: He tells God about a time when Mercy said, “What is God afraid of?”

(It’s Alecto, right? He’s scared of Alecto?)

I have capital-T Thoughts about John’s use of Dominus rather than Deus — Dominus has connotations of lordship and ownership that Deus really doesn’t, and Dominicus, the name of the sun of the Nine Houses, means something like “belonging to the Lord.” Soooooo if this is a reminder, it’s an pretty creepy one! He named Dominicus as a reminder to the Nine Houses that their sun belongs to him. Eurgh.

ETA: Sparrow adds to this that Dominus illuminatio mea is the motto of Oxford.

THEN ON THE SAME PAGE:

So I’m shut in here — walled in, really — to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none houses, with left grief. (p. 344)

I’m so mad at this one. Mad at myself, really, for knowing it. I regret everything that has led me to this moment. This is a meme about pizza from Domino’s, and truly, my life has been misspent that I know this. She rhymed beef and grief. I want to quit the gym.

“[A.L.] stood for a couple of things. A joke, mostly. I often called her Annabel Lee. Annie Laurie. When I first met her I just called her First, One. She had a real name, but I buried it with her, and nobody says it anymore.” (p. 345)

“Annie Laurie” is a Scottish ballad about a beautiful girl. John is just… really extremely fucking sinister.

The Heralds of Number Seven — the ghost of a swiftly murdered planet in the demesne of Dominicus — arrived that evening, around forty-three minutes before the habitation lights were due to go off. (p.357)

Lunula points out that “a swiftly murdered planet” is surely a reference to Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which is one of the sequel books to A Wrinkle in Time.

“Continue that sentence,” she said, “and I’ll make it to the pain.” (p. 369)

A reference of course to The Princess Bride, amongst the greatest pieces of art in our time.

Poor Ortus doesn’t really deserve Harrow’s wrath.

I’m not sure if or how best to gloss chapters 40-42, but they’re all making reference to popular AU (alternate universe) premises in fanfic. Chapter 40 is doing the AU where the two main characters switch jobs (so if it were Supernatural, you might have an AU where Dean’s the angel and Cas is the hunter, etc.). Chapter 41 looks like a royalty AU situation. Chapter 42 is of course a coffee shop AU, and Gideon is the barista (BARI star).

I’d read any of those fics.

“If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.” (p. 380)

That first part is from Psalms 137 (which is about weeping by the river): “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.”

The second bit is from Ruth, when Ruth is vowing never to leave Naomi: “Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.” It’s also a callback to the last thing Gideon says to Harrow before dying at the end of Gideon the Ninth.

“It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier; it was the morning of the third day.” (p. 399)

Oh Harrow, oh honey.

Obvi this is a reference to Jesus, who was resurrected on the third day.

She opened her mouth to ask her dead second cavalier a question about her dead first cavalier — a pattern that was starting to look less like tragedy and more like carelessness — but downstairs, Abigail was [talking]. (p. 403)

This is a reference to a famous line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, where Lady Bracknell says to Jack, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” (h/t to Sparrow for this one!)

“What is the plan, Pent?”

“Why, to let ghosts bury ghosts,” she said. (p. 403)

I am not sure about this one, and usually when I have not felt fairly sure, I’ve left it alone. But there’s at least a definite echo here of Luke 9, where Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.”

ETA: On page 311 of Gideon the Ninth, when Harrow is forbidding Gideon to see Dulcinea on the grounds that she’s going to die no matter what Gideon does, she says, “Let the dead reclaim the dead.” Make of this what you will!

Again, let me say: sorry. It was not my thumb to let them bite off. I admit completely that this was my bad, but these motherfuckers had a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy. (p.405)

I went into a weird research rabbit hole trying to figure this one out. I KNEW IT WAS A THING and I was right; I just couldn’t figure out what the thing was. But I eventually figured it out, for I am persistent. It’s a reference to this thing called “Llamas with Hats” that for some reason exists. Here’s the relevant bit. It’s very cursed.

“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.

“All of it.”…

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?” (p. 465)

“Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,” is a line from the first act of Henry V, when the men of the church are trying to convince Henry V that he has a claim to the throne of France and should definitely go to war with them. Henry V is one of those plays where you’re always like “wait, so then did Shakespeare like war / beating up women / anti-Semitism or is he critiquing it?” and the answer is always, unsatisfyingly, probably both.

Kia hua ko te pai is a line from the Māori version of the New Zealand national anthem.

“Snap back to reality oops there goes gravity” is — as my friend Julia told me! — a line from the Eminem song “Lose Yourself.”

“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. (p. 468)

“Wake me up inside” is from the Evanescence song “Bring Me to Life.” As with the none pizza left beef joke, I somehow regret knowing this one more than I regret most of my knowledge. I think it’s because in those cases, I just deeply wish my brain had chosen to allot that space to something better — but no, here comes Evanescence in my head all like Save me from the noooothiiiiiiing I’ve beco-o-ome! Bah.

Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John.” (p.480)

This is such a silly play on the ayes have it that I am including it here, I found it extremely charming.

Mercy turned around to Augustine. She was not weeping now.

“It is finished,” she said.

This is again from the Gospel of John. John 19:30 says: “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”

He murmured, “You said there was no forgiveness.”

“‘I pardon him, as God shall pardon me,'” said the Emperor. (p. 491)

That’s a line from the end of Richard II, where Henry Bolingbroke, who will shortly become Henry IV (of Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II fame), agrees to pardon someone who has rebelled against his kingship. He does so because the guy’s mother begged for his life. Then he executed everybody else who was involved in the rebellion

If you are like wow I have never read Richard II and maybe I want to but eh maybe not, can I point you toward the Andre Holland radio play version recently released by WNYC and the Public Theater?

“Yes, well, jail for Mother,’ I said. (p. 498)

This is a reference to a Patricia Lockwood tweet that went sufficiently viral that she did a whole interview on Vulture about it.

Hooooo boy that was a thing I just spent a whole bunch of time on, wasn’t it? I’m embarrassed for myself and you should all be embarrassed with me, but this is what quarantine has done to me apparently.

The post Harrow the Ninth, Glossed appeared first on Reading the End.

Still, though, if you cast your mind back through the mists of time, you may recall that in the Before, when one felt the strange and alien emotion Joy, one wished to share it. Which I did! Except not that many people had read Harrow the Ninth yet so I had to track down people on Twitter and badger them into talking to me about Harrow the Ninth for an hour, and that is this podcast. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 134

The Guests

Constance Grady is a culture writer for Vox and fearless leader of the Vox Book Club. Follow her on Twitter!

Bria LaVorgna is the managing editor at Tosche Station and our nation’s most preeminent scholar of the life and works of Dr. Aphra. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram!

Natalie Zutter is a playwright, podcaster, and pop culture critic who writes about (among many things!) TV, books, fan culture. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram and find her at New Play Exchange.

Here are some useful time signatures, if you’d like to avoid being spoiled, get totally spoiled, or listen to some people screaming about That One Thing (lol I’m kidding, there’s no One Thing in this book that’s so specifically outrageous it’s immediately identifiable as The thing):

2:05 – Non-spoilery reactions
12:00 – All the spoilers
47:17 – We address that one threesome

the Patricia Lockwood tweet

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript

Harrow Transcript

Jenny: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast, with the Demographically Similar Jennys, except in this case, just me, Gin Jenny, and I am joined by a plethora of wonderful guests, Bria, Constance, and Natalie. Can y’all introduce yourselves and tell the listeners who you are?

B: Sure! My name is Bria LaVorgna. Usually I do Star Wars podcasts, so I feel like I usually have different credentials that I list here, and right now I don’t know what to say, except that I really really loved Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, so much that I dressed like Harrow the other week, so… yeah! That’s me.

C: Hey, I’m Constance Grady, I’m the book critic for Vox.com, and I guess my big cred for this is that I loved Gideon the Ninth with all my heart and then I made like all the policy wonks at Vox read it and get very disconcerted about why I was so into it, and then they read it and they were like, I get it now.

N: I’m Natalie Zutter. I used to be a staff writer at Tor.com, when Gideon the Ninth was being produced and published and released, so it was really fun to be in the background and promo side of that. I now am a contributor for Tor.com, as well as Den of Geek and elsewhere, and got to still pull some strings to get an early copy of Harrow, and I’m so happy I did.

J: Yeah, I have no idea why they sent me an early copy of Harrow, but I’m very very excited about it. I’ve been having a rough 2020, and I feel like I deserved it.

C: I think we all deserved it. We all deserve something this beautiful in our lives.

J: Yeah. So I wanted to start with a brief, non-spoiler section, and I’d like to start by doing a quick roundtable of what everyone’s non-spoiler overall reactions were to Harrow the Ninth. Bria, do you want to kick us off, as someone who has dressed as Harrow?

B: Tamsyn… She… I don’t even know what to say, what you can say without really doing spoilers, because I would like to list this book as the cause of my death and also thank her for giving me my life. And that’s about all I can say about this book in spoiler-free mode.

C: I actually found this book at the beginning a little less immediately accessible than Gideon was, right? Because with Gideon you get that really fun tension between this baroque, overwrought world of like, skulls and everything is made out of human body parts and it’s super gross, and then Gideon has that very irreverent, fun voice, and the tension between them kind of powers you through, and it’s sort of easy and fun and relaxed. Whereas in Harrow, we’re in Harrow’s head, and she is not irreverent the way Gideon is. She’s actually reverent. She’s a nun! So I think for me, a big part of sort of getting into the groove of this book was moving away from the tension of the first book and into this sense of the—instead of enjoying the gap between narrator and world, sort of rooting for more of a gap between narrator and world. What I wanted from this book was for Harrow to stop being so worshipful, and to sort of lose her religious faith, and the tension there ended up being what pushed me forward. It was sort of like the difference between a fun action comedy that gets really dark at the end and just straight-up horror.

N: Like Constance, I also found it a little less accessible at the beginning, and it was that peculiar feeling when you fall head over bones for Gideon. I knew, obviously, that it wasn’t gonna be her voice in this, and when the cover got revealed there was the excerpt that kind of primed people for the second person. I had the tiniest bit of disappointment because it wasn’t as easy to just sink into it; it really felt like you had to work for it, which of course is so fitting with it being Harrow’s story, like it’s stubborn, and it doesn’t give much away, and—yeah, you really had to earn it. There were parts of it that were difficult, but especially on a second read, I just love it. I’ll never love it as much as Gideon, but I find it such an excellent companion piece.

J: This is so fascinating, because I identify a lot more with Harrow than I did with Gideon, so for me, this was—I think both of them started a little slow, but for me, this was so much more a book that I could identify with. And I loved Gideon, but I think I enjoyed this one exponentially more than I enjoyed Gideon, and I loved Gideon the Ninth.

B: I feel like this book made you go, What the heck is going on? What the heck is going on? so much in the early section! Because, I mean, I guess if we say it it’ll be a spoiler, but I think I spent the first third of the book trying to figure out what was happening. That kept me engaged in the best way. Whereas Gideon the Ninth felt a bit more straightforward at times than this one did, with all the POV changes and everything.

C: I also identify with Harrow more than I did with Gideon, and I think that’s part of why I immediately latch onto Gideon, because Harrow hates herself, right? So when you’re stuck in her head you kind of get that sense of self-loathing, dragging you in, and it’s sort of claustrophobic and closed off. But then the POV changes really jar you and sort of create an escape, almost, from the self-loathing and the stultifyingness of that, because you’re suddenly lost in your own bewilderment. It’s very challenging to me! This book was putting up a fight! It did not want to let me in. It wants to resist your being, in a way that I thought was super interesting and made the end feel so earned and so worth it.

N: Yeah, I think Harrow definitely had the bigger emotional character journey. I think Gideon very much fulfills something she didn’t know until the end that she needed to fulfill, but Harrow I think was much more about self-discovery and truly coming to some sort of peace.

C: Yeah, the way Gideon’s emotional arc in the first one is almost more Harrow’s arc, because what she wants is for Harrow to give her acceptance and love. And once she receives that, then her arc kind of completes itself.

J: I’m like rubbing my collarbone, because I just care about them both so much. I just want them both to find happiness.

C: Oh God. Oh God.

B: It’s so hard not to say the best—or what I think is the best line in the book right now, because that’ll move us right into spoiler territory. But it’s so relevant to everything we’re talking around!

J: Well, we’ll get to it. I mean, the other thing that I think I can say that’s not a spoiler is that this book, even more than the previous one, although it’s true of both of them, felt so completely free of the male gaze. It was the most freeing and joyful reading experience that I’ve had in a while. I mean, Harrow even more than Gideon just doesn’t give a shit, and even though Harrow hates herself so much, it somehow still—the reading experience felt like it was buoying me up in these troubled times.

C: Yes! And especially I think for—the descriptions of Ianthe as being actively ugly but somehow also deeply beautiful to Harrow at the same time, I think are so key to that. She’s this really weird liminal figure in her liminal spaces that just is so clearly not written for any male gaze to appreciate. She’s just oddly beautiful and oddly repulsive to Harrow at the same time.

N: Also cause she spent so much of Gideon as a sort of shadow figure and letting everyone put their own projections onto her, and I feel like that’s a very feminine thing, where she was always the not-pretty one and the one who’s clearly in Coronabeth’s shadow, and then obviously that gets reversed. I feel like there’s a familiarity to that that leads to a certain experience.

C: I love that moment in Gideon where Harrow refers to Corona as “the big one” and Ianthe as “the other one.” It’s just so like telling to their dynamic: Even Harrow is overwhelmed by Corona and has allowed Ianthe to slip away.

J: We’ll get into it, but I absolutely loved Ianthe’s position in this book compared to in Gideon the Ninth, which I just reread earlier this week. I’m also curious what y’all think—because I’m very much a second installment of the trilogy girl—so I’m interested what y’all think about this as a second installment in the trilogy. I’m very like, The Two Towers, Emily Climbs, Empire Strikes Back.

C: This is tricky. I’m very agnostic on a second book. I think it’s the hardest part of a trilogy to make work, and when it does work, it’s like amazing and so satisfying. But when it doesn’t, you just sort of feel like you’re marking time until the resolution. I think in a certain way, it’ll be hard for me to tell whether I really loved Harrow the Ninth as a structural component of this trilogy until the third book comes out and I’ve been able to read it. As it stands now, it has done a satisfying job of both having its own standalone arcs and deepening the larger mythology and sort of setting up the stakes for book three in a way that I’m excited to dive into.

N: To the deepening of the mythology part, I feel like that’s so often the goal of the second book or a second movie, is to sort of: You’ve learned a lot about this world, and then they kind of keep expanding the borders so that they’re not just telling the same story, and I feel like sometimes it can be difficult… Like with Rainbow Rowell’s second book, Wayward Son, is here. I didn’t love it as much as I did Carry On, because I felt like it had to expand the world, and it did so in fascinating ways, but it felt like it sacrificed some of the action for that, and like the status quo didn’t feel like it changed a ton by the end, so that by the time we get into the third, it was like, well, I had this side quest, and it was great, but I don’t know if I feel like the characters have changed a lot. But with Harrow, I felt like it was a very successful second book in that it brought so much more context to the Nine Houses, which I will say took me way too long to catch on to some of the stuff.

J: Oh, God, same.

N: And the Resurrection, and all that. It was a whole new cast of characters. But at the same time, if I hadn’t known that Alecto the Ninth is coming out, then I feel like I could have read this as a duology, and that would have fit the world that Tamsyn had created of these pairs.

B: That makes a lot of sense. I agree about not really knowing how to feel about it as a middle installment until we get the next book, because if we hadn’t had that last chapter, I agree that these two could have stood by themselves perfectly fine. I also admit that the author is way smarter than me, and I have no idea what she’s going to do at any given time, so I’m just like, please just give me the next book and let me just lie on the ground and contemplate my life after I finish it, for two hours. Again. And thank her for the privilege.

J: I thought it did a really great job of resolving some major mysteries but then also both deepening existing mysteries and introducing new ones in a way that made me so, so fucking thirsty for the third book.

B: One of the first things I wanted to do when I finished reading Harrow was go back and read Gideon the Ninth, and see how not only a lot of the things that you found out towards the end of Gideon, how she had seeded them earlier on, but also how different things that we learned in Harrow the Ninth sort of came into play, and you just read it, and you’re like, Oh, oh my God. Oh my God. John something. How dare you. I can’t believe he’s named John. Okay, sorry, I went further.

J: Yeah, I reread Gideon the Ninth, and there’s a part where they find like a note that says “One flesh one end G&P” and I was like OH SHIT.

B: YES! Oh, my God. I can’t even hear the phrase “one flesh one end” without wanting to curl into myself and cry a little.

J: Oh God, same, absolutely same. Okay, you know what? We’ve been very restrained. I think it’s fine for us to get into spoilers now. Does someone here want to describe the structure of Harrow the Ninth?

C: Overwhelming, but I will do it. I will do my best. Okay. Okay. Harrow the Ninth goes back and forth between two points of view, both ostensibly in Harrow’s head. First, we get the second-person stuff that’s happening loosely in the present leading up to, we’re told in the chapter headings, the night that the Emperor is murdered. And then the rest of it is past tense third person, and it’s sort of—at first appears to be retelling us the events of Book One, but with Ortus taking the place of Gideon and every so often someone says, “That’s not how it happened,” and it’s the greatest thing in the world.

J: My whole body is curling in on itself thinking about people saying That’s not how it happened.

C: When the skeleton says it? Oh my God.

J: OKAY.

B: Oh, man.

J: Let’s start with the third-person sections, the part that’s kind of an AU of Gideon the Ninth, because that’s—It took me a really long time for the penny to drop on what was happening with that. I’m very curious how quickly y’all figured it out.

B: I didn’t quite figure it out as early as I should’ve. I didn’t figure it out until the second-person chapter that ends with “me.”

C: Ah! The greatest moment in the entire history of literature.

B: Whole body shivers.

J: Yeah, same.

B: And the other reason I didn’t figure it out as early as I wanted to, but I picked up more when I did my reread, is I didn’t remember the order of the deaths, which differ very, very differently in the AU. I knew Abigail and Magnus, I knew they died early, and I was like, huh, okay, so this isn’t quite right. But I couldn’t keep track of everyone else, and then so when I was reading it this time and paying attention to it, I was like, oh! Those are the signs I should’ve seen earlier on.

N: The Sleeper was what kept tripping me up, because it was such a departure, and yet I was not understanding what it was supposed to be representing. That kept confusing me, because I was like, so there’s a person that is the antagonist, but— And the Ortus stuff, I guess I was thinking of it as an AU, but at the same time, I just didn’t get the AU of it. I kept sort of passively listening along and kind of tracking all the details that felt different, but I couldn’t grok the intent of it for a long time.

C: Yeah, I think I sort of vaguely said, okay! This is just what Harrow thinks happens, in her understanding of the past without Gideon, and I just sort of let myself get swept up. I think because it’s so easy to trust Tamsyn Muir as an author that I was just like, she knows what she’s doing! I’m just gonna let her do this! It’ll make sense eventually, probably! If not, it’s because I’m dumb.

N: I was also really struck, in rereading it, that she writes the third person portions so well in that there are so many lines that have dual meaning once you understand that this is, as they call it, a play, with these figures playacting for her. I didn’t notice how often so many characters turn to Abigail and they ask her stuff, and about like, well I was called and I was told to appear here, and Abigail keeps cutting them off, and managing everything, but then acting as if—like, pivoting to Harrow as if Harrow is still the star of the story. It was so brilliantly done, that there’s so many little moments of specific warning, I think it’s Lieutenant Dyas who says “I don’t know why I asked that” or “I don’t know what answer I thought I’d get.” And you can tell these people are not just Harrow’s memories, but that they’re actually participating in something that they don’t understand.

C: And the moment when Ortus turns to Harrow and says “You never had any imagination. I don’t know why you picked me” is so—Once you go back and reread that moment, you feel so much for him, even though you’ve spent the entire book judging him through Harrow’s eyes. It’s such a good moment. She hates him so much, it brings me so much joy.

B: I love it when Harrow hates people. It just makes me happy.

J: This conversation is so justifying, because I felt like I was such a dumb-dumb, because I didn’t really take in that this was an AU of Gideon the Ninth until someone said Abigail Pent’s name, and at that point, I was like, Oh, shit, I know what’s going on!

B: Well, the other thing that kept throwing me was Ortus and then Not-Ortus, because I kept thinking, why are they both named Ortus?

C: And in the cast of characters, his name’s in a different font! So, so subtle. So good.

B: It’s the line—I think it’s Mercymorn asks Harrow at some point, What is the name of the Saint of Duty? And when I read that the second time around, I was like, Ohhhhhh. That’s why she’s doing that! Are we calling him Gideon Prime, Ortus, the Saint of Duty…?

C: Doesn’t our Gideon call him Gideon Classic at one point? I was kind of into that.

B: She goes through like twenty different names. I think it’s like, Gideon Prime, Gideon Original Flavor, Gideon Zero, Gideon Episode One— It’s like a different name for three pages in a row.

C: I know that they both think of Harrow as being the smart one, but I really think Gideon’s facility for nicknames shows that she might actually be the smarter one.

B: Can I now say the one line in this book that killed me and that I just wanna die over? “I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.” Like—ahhhhhh. How dare you.

J: My shoulders caved in when you said that.

N: Gideon’s fury and grief—

J: God, it’s agony, and I mean, I think this is a good time to talk about how super super fanfictiony this book is, because not only are the third-person sections an AU of Gideon the Ninth, but it also, as the book goes on, gets more and more fanfictiony to the point there’s kind of a coffee shop AU.

N: I screamed. I saw that and just put the book down and was just like, are you fucking kidding me? She didn’t.

J: Gideon is serving Harrow coffee, and I was like, I need to leave.

N: And it took me until the second read to get the—they called it BARI, and they’re like, we’ll visit the BARI Star—like, barista!

C: How dare she? That’s so perfect.

B: I missed that!

N: But then even before that, isn’t Harrow in sort of a Hunger Games-y selection-y kind of AU? Where there’s a ball—

C: Like I’m honestly shocked she didn’t do a His Dark Materials daemon AU. She was leading up to that.

N: You almost wish Harrow hadn’t gotten cut off by Abigail. I would have loved to see a dozen of these mini-worlds that she was frantically thinking of, because at that point, she’s coping and trying to just shuffle in a new reality or something.

B: I loved Magnus’s reactions.

C: Basically she’s reading fic for the same reason that so many fic authors write fic, because you want to deal with the trauma of your favorite character dying by writing a world without trauma, where—or, like, one where the pain is very easy to work through and it can be cathartic and just over and done with. She was basically writing fix-it fic for herself. It’s so elegant.

N: And because there are rules and tropes. I think at one point, Ortus even says to her about the version of Canaan House she’s constructing, he’s like, there are rules and it has to follow it. And so I feel like so much of that processing is about this sense of like, well, if I only put us in a coffee shop AU, or if there’s only one bed, or if there’s a fake marriage, we can figure it out because there’s a blueprint.

B: Can I tell you guys the truly terrible thing I did, sort of related to the costumes I did the other week?

J: Oh my God I’m so excited.

B: So, I sent my Gideon a test picture without the makeup on, cause I was like, screw it, I’ll do it live, with the bones and everything. I sent it to her, and then I had—and then I turned on “I Forgot that You Existed” as soon as I sent her the test picture.

Everyone: NOOOOOOOO.

B: And it’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell her because she hasn’t read the book yet.

C: Oh my God!

B: I would say I’m not proud of it, but I’m still really amused by it, and I have it written down to tell her as soon as she reads the book.

N: I just handed Gideon to my husband, and again, I’ve been talking about this book for a year, I was like, you need to read this! Cause like, I am losing the ability to be able to talk to you about this, and now of course rereading Harrow, I’m like, Fuck it! You need to read at least one of these, so I can at least start to talk to you about it!

J: Some of my friends have been reading it, and they keep telling me these tantalizing pieces of information about what they’ve read of Gideon the Ninth. One of my friends was like, Oh, I just met a nerd, and I was like, TELL ME EVERYTHING that you feel about Palamedes the Sixth!

C: The relationship between Palamedes and Camilla is so important to me.

B: Yessssss. Also Camilla the Sixth can step on me, and I will thank her for the privilege.

N: Well, I love that we got to see the people who are still alive. For all that we got extra time with the characters that Harrow kind of initially dismissed in the first book, I love that she got confronted with like, oh, no, no, some people made it out, and they didn’t choose Lyctorhood, and they’re doing it! They’re part of the Blood of Eden, and they’re talking on the other side, and you’ve gotta face them, and not just dismiss them.

J: Can we talk about Abigail Pent? Because I was so excited to get to see more of her in this book, and I don’t think that I had really strong feelings about her from Gideon the Ninth, but like, seeing her in the third person sections of this book, I was like, oh, actually, I would die for her.

C: Yeah, it’s so surprising when you go back and reread Gideon after Harrow that she’s honestly barely in it? She says like five sentences the whole way through.

J: Yeah!

C: But then you realize reading Harrow why she had to die first, because she so clearly would have fully understood what Cytherea was doing really fast.

B: I love her relationship with Magnus, too. That just—the two of them just made me happy. I was like, can you guys be my parents or something?

C: They’re so aspirational and so pure!

N: I think Gideon kind of glommed onto Magnus more, even though they weren’t best buds in the first book, but of the two of them, and because we’re seeing the first book through Gideon’s eyes, Magnus was the one who stood out more because he was so welcoming and just kind of unflagging in his positivity toward them. And then it’s so interesting to see that like, of this duo, Harrow is fixating more on Abigail, and that—so they’re sort of each imprinting on one of these relationship goals kind of people.

J: I just about died when Ortus is reciting poetry to Magnus, and Harrow tries to stop him, and Magnus is like, “No, no, no, because poetry from the Fifth is really stupid, so I’m very excited to hear this!” I just felt so tender towards him at that moment.

C: Yeah, it’s really fun how Magnus and Abigail also are sort of a functional version of Gideon and Harrow? They sort of replicate their dynamic in a—if they were not super fucked up! The smart dark one and the sunshiney one together!

N: I feel like we also got a sense in this book, and this is kind of talking in the present portions, so we can also pick it up in a different part of the talk, but I feel like we’ve gotten a sense of more and more necromancer/cavalier duos where like, there was maybe something romantic, or at least some sort of intimacy, with the various Lyctors talking about the cavaliers they lost. Previously it seemed like kind of a taboo, rare thing of like, oh! Abigail and Magnus, they’re married!

J: They’re cavalier primarried!

N: But I feel like this normalized it a little more, like it was actually, oh, Harrow, you’re the weird one for thinking this is weird.

C: But I also do really love that so many of their relationships are not romantic but always still deeply meaningful. Like you always know that the relationship is the most important one in the world for both of them, even when it’s fully platonic. That’s so rare still in fiction, I feel like, for there to be that primacy of not even friendship, I think, because it’s beyond that, but still not in any way sexual or romantic.

N: It’s literally, this is my person.

J: Which was very interesting, because in the third person sections, Ortus is the cavalier primary for Harrow, and I think that the author did such a good job of starting with you thinking of him as a total sad sack, and then as the book progresses, you become very fond of him, to the point of—he acts very magnificent towards the end! I didn’t expect it at all!

C: Yeah, there’s such tenderness in it.

B: How he brings up whats-his-face—

J: Matthias Nonius? Yeah!

B: I’m like, you just willed him, his spirit, to be there with your poetry! How? Ortus! That’s what made me fond of him at the end.

N: Well, and it plays into all the fanfiction stuff, where it’s like, I was writing this epic about this figure, and I literally—yeah, like you said, I conjured him out of my scribblings.

C: There’s so much love towards every single character in these books. You can just feel how much the author is fond of all of them, even when the other characters hate each other.

N: Yes!

J: And I also thought she did such a great job of introducing so many different elements that feel like they’re just a throwaway joke, and then they turn out to be the most relevant thing. So like, the whole third-person section, there’s just constant really vicious jokes at Ortus’s expense for writing this epic poem, but then at the end, it becomes the most important thing that saves their lives! I just thought that was so much fun, and so satisfying.

N: And I love also that we got to see the real Dulcinea Septimus.

B: Yes!

C: Who is a delight! So charming! Like, I’m immediately like, I get why Palamedes is secretly in love with her from afar!

N: And she has just such nobility in—cause she’s just as wasting away, if not more, than the version that Cytherea’s pretending to be, and I feel like she was a very quiet, but then prominent character at the end, when she has her final scene with Harrow.

J: I loved that scene with Harrow! I think in the structure of the book, you are starting to worry that Harrow in the third-person sections won’t know the things that Harrow in the second-person sections would need to know. Like, not know that Gideon was still kind of around? And so that scene when Dulcinea tells her, like, Gideon is still around, is a really huge deal and I got really—I truly got emotional when Harrow says there’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card and saving the last dance. I was just a mess.

N: That was so beautiful.

C: Should we talk about Gideon in this book? Because it’s such a relief to me when her point of view takes over, I think partially because I had been really missing the irreverence of her voice, and when it breaks out, it’s like you can take a full breath of air for the first time reading. There’s this new energy to the book that I had missed so much, and for it to come back was just like, ah! Yes! Finally! I felt as relieved almost as Harrow would in that moment.

J: Yes, so let’s get into the second-person sections. When—I think I messaged at least two of you when Harrow was talking to Palamedes, and she says something like, the narration says something like, you couldn’t have known that he had seen me.

Everyone: AHHHHHHHH.

C: SO GOOD.

J: It felt like the book had just looked up with its eyes and looked into my eyes. I really couldn’t cope with it.

B: I don’t know how my friend who read it before me and then like, made sure I got a copy of the ARC, like, I don’t know how she kept a straight face, digital straight face, when I hit that part. And I’m like IS IT GIDEON?? IS IT GIDEON???? in her DMS, and she just somehow went, I dunno what’s up!, and then once I got further on, she was like, Yep! There it is!

N: Oh, that’s a good friend.

J: Who here knew it was Gideon? Cause I definitely didn’t, I’m slow.

C: I was like, it can go either way. It’s either Gideon or it’s the thing that Abigail has already said is haunting her.

N: I knew it was Gideon. It’s funny because I was so surprised that it hadn’t occurred to me before. I flipped back and I noticed a few lines, like a few chapters prior—

C: You were also such a little bitch when you were angry?

N: Yup!

C: That’s such a good line!

N: Like why would Harrow say that to herself? And it’s like, oh no, of course, it’s Gideon saying it!

C: The second person I think is done very elegantly because even though it is mostly in Harrow’s head and you can sort of read it as, Harrow is dissociating from herself out of trauma, which is traditionally what second person does, I think, there’s still these occasional moments where the narrator is like, very affectionately puzzled by Harrow’s word choices. At one point she’s in the shuttle and she mentions the bathroom as like, a place for bodily functions, and the narrator says, Or, a toilet, as anyone else in the world would say!

N: Yes, and the repetition of, the handle of the sword, the pommel!

C: It’s just very, very like subtly worked in there, but there’s this sense that the narrator is maybe not quite Harrow, and it doesn’t fully become clear who it is until she finally wakes up and is alone in the body.

J: How do y’all feel about second person narration overall?

C: I’m very skeptical overall. I think it can be done and done well, but so often it feels a little gimmicky to me. When I saw that first chapter excerpt that came out with the cover reveal, I was kind of like, okay, like, I trust Tamsyn enough to pull this off, but I’m not in love with the idea. I think here it works so well on so many different levels that it’s fully justified and I’m completely behind it. But, you know, I was a little wary when I first saw that that was how she was going in.

B: I had just read The Raven Tower, like maybe two months before I read this, which is also done really really well with second person. So I think between that and this book, I’m just like, sure, if you are smart enough and brave enough to pull it off, I’ll read it. It’s not usually something I think of being interested in reading, but I mean, clearly here, it was done with very great effect.

N: Yeah, that’s the thing. I feel like it has to be so committed to and so carefully written to pack in those effects. I think prior to this, I regarded second person as almost like a one-trick pony of like, okay, there’s a limited number of reasons why you’re doing this, I can probably reverse engineer whatever twist you’re building toward, which again was why I felt so surprised when I was like, Oh! Why did it never occur to me that this was Gideon? Which I think is a testament to how Tamsyn’s writing it. Having read it, and then I read Raven Tower shortly after, I’m a lot more sold on it now. I look forward to reading more second person stories.

J: I loved it and I thought it was a good fit for Harrow, because even before we discover that it’s Gideon, Harrow hates herself so much so that the accusatory tone of second person works really well for her as a character. Even before I knew that it was Gideon speaking, I thought it worked really well, even though I also am a little skeptical of second person as an overall thing.

C: The moment the first-person pronoun slips in reminded me really strongly of—shifting genres completely—Fleishman Is in Trouble, which came out last summer, the Taffy Brodesson-Akner book?, which is told mostly in close third, but at the very end of the first paragraph, there’s this tiny moment where second person plural slips in and the narrator says “is what our friend Seth would have said,” and then it takes another fifty pages before you realize that the guy whose head you’re in in close third is not actually the narrator, that it’s being narrated by a friend of his who keeps deflecting attention away from herself. You realize eventually that she’s sort of Trojan-horsed her story into this man’s story because she says that the only way you can make people care about a woman’s story is to Trojan-horse it into a man’s. It’s an amazing line.

J: That’s rough.

C: I highly recommend Fleishman. But this sort of felt very similar in that it was playing off of our expectations and slipping in these tiny tiny very elegant little hints and Trojan-horsing in a way Gideon’s arc into Harrow’s in the same way that the first book Trojan-horsed Harrow’s into Gideon’s. So their stories have become completely intertwined.

J: That’s such a good point and I love it, because Harrow of course is my favorite, because I’m very very soft for an asshole genius who thinks she knows everything. I’m curious what y’all thought in general of the—so the second person narration takes place in this place called the Mithraeum?, where Harrow and Ianthe are the new Lyctors, so they’re interacting with God slash the Emperor Undying and his three Saints, Mercymorn, Augustine, and Ortus slash Gideon, Gideon Prime?

N: Gideon Prime.

J: So these were new characters to the book so I’m wondering what y’all thought of them overall.

N: I was so tickled by Mercymorn especially, like, I’d forgotten her until the reread, her propensity for speaking in double exclamation points, and I loved how just hysterical she was, but not in a hysterical way of like, that you would undermine a woman, just this sense of—she’s seen it all, she’s experienced it all, and she’s just so aggravated by it.

B: My favorite thing about Mercymorn was how she kept lowering Harrow’s age, to the point where they were like, she’s three years old! I was like oh my God, Mercy, you can’t possibly—okay. We’re gonna go with that.

N: I love their ennui in the sense of—they’d be like, well the last time I saw him was twenty years ago, a blink of an eye. They simultaneously seemed so bored with each other and with everything, but also clearly still had these rivalries and resentments and stuff built up.

C: And I loved the dynamic between Mercy and Augustine and the sort of sense of both strong sibling vibes between them, like, the mingled affection and rivaltry, but also this sense of overwhelming comradeship in the face of their love and hatred for—I feel like I just wanna call him John.

J: Yeah, call him John!

C: He’s the only character that I feel like Tamsyn does not love, and so I do not love him either, and I want to bring him down.

N: Ooh, what do you mean by that?

C: I feel like he’s the only character who I am not invited to take delight in. Even when he pulls out the greatest dad joke ever written, I think, in the history of literature—

All: [giggling]

C: I’m delighted by the moment, but I am not thrilled by him, in a way that I feel like even with Cytherea in the first book, who was as close as you would get to a villain in that book, you were invited to see where she was coming from, in a way, and feel like she was making some valid points, and even more so now that her backstory been’s retrofitted on in this book. But with the Emperor, with John, I sort of felt like I was being asked to be like, no, he’s done so much shitty stuff! Even if he does have justification for it in his own head, it’s still so overwhelmingly terrible that I can’t be delighted by him in the same way that I am by everyone else in these books.

B: See, she got me to be somewhat invested in him with that line in the epilogue of Gideon. And God said, I am not enough. And that just stabbed me right in my soul, and that kind of—I think it helped me more when I got to this book, because no one in this book is necessarily—well. Abigail. But everyone else is like, not necessarily a great person, and I liked that you actually felt the weight of the millennia on all of these characters. Someone mentioned before they were talking about—oh yeah, we made up like twenty years ago, it’s fine, don’t worry about it. They were able to be these not—I don’t know. He worked for me, and not just cause of the dad joke.

C: I think he works for me as a character, and I think he fulfills his role in the universe very well, but I just do not have the love for him that I have for literally everyone else.

B: I can’t bring myself to be fond of Gideon Prime, mostly cause he keeps trying to murder Harrow all the damn time!

C: How dare he.

B: God! Let my girl rest. She will never rest.

N: My feelings on John kept shifting because on the one hand, I love that he had this sort of bemused, like, I’m an average guy, kind of mentality. It seemed like he went to so many pains to be like, no, I’m not God, I’m your teacher, or, I’m this guy who’s trying to level with you over tea and biscuits, but then when you get such a different sense of how he caused the Resurrection and I would love at some point to actually like talk through all the revelations. I feel like I’m still not clear on everything! But it definitely seems like it was a lot more self-serving than the first time they talked about the Resurrection. I feel like the first time they talked about him, it’s a lot of, he raised everyone up. But did he also kill them? And then raise them up? And so, it was so hard to—am I getting the Emperor Undying, the Necrolord Prime, or am I getting this selfish, mediocre man?

C: And I feel like there’s so much in the way that he will sort of tell people he doesn’t want to be God, because he’s doing something very specific where he’ll be like, I don’t want to be God to you yet. Or, think of me in my aspect as a teacher. Where he’s very clear that he is God and that the life of everyone in this solar system depends on him, but he doesn’t want them to make a big proceeding out of it, because that’ll make him feel kinda weird. It’s this very selfish, egotistical way of appearing to humble while not being humble at all.

J: There’s an early line—like, pretty early in the book where I think Augustine says—either Augustine or Mercymorn says, he’s not as sentimental as he seems. And I feel like that’s a real keynote of his character, because he seems like he’s quite sentimental. He’s very soft towards Harrow, it seems like he’s very soft towards all his Saints, but then at the end of the book, he is very merciless in an unexpected way.

B: So wait. So here’s my question for you guys, then, is how did you take the revelation about him doing the cavalier Lyctor thing perfectly? But never telling them? Cause that was just like, oh my God, and I was a hundred percent, at that point, with them, and I was like, yes! Let’s kill God! Let’s do this!

All: [laughter]

N: That felt unforgivable because I feel like even when they confronted him, he didn’t really explain his justification. I wasn’t sure if it was—I honestly don’t remember what his justification was, if anybody else can fill it in. None of it felt like a satisfying enough explanation to make up for what he did.

J: I don’t wanna be this person, cause I have the greatest dad in the world, but I feel like the thing of a dad being like, giving a very inadequate justification and being like, so you understand, right? And the kid of the dads being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally, totally, like, don’t worry about it, Dad. I felt like that was very much in evidence here.

C: I feel like that moment was the moment where I was like, I will never forgive him for anything, ever, that he does. It’s such a profound betrayal, because in a way, it created all of the other betrayals that this universe is built on, right? They all did something unforgivable, when they killed their cavaliers, and this is the launching point for it. It’s sort of the original sin of this universe.

N: Yeah. So was his reasoning that he and Alecto made it work, but then was he claiming something went wrong and that’s why he pushed the others away from it?

J: That’s my understanding. Honestly, it seemed to me that he thought that Alecto had become something that he couldn’t control, and he was upset about it, and that’s why he made the decision that he made.

C: Yeah, it’s very unclear. I’m looking at the passage now, and he’s just sort of like, It would have rankled to you if I had told you the truth, and he doesn’t really explain why he felt that it could never be repeated. It’s like, not really something that he feels the need to lay out his decision on, pretty much.

N: And if we’re understanding correctly, both parties can achieve Lyctorhood—I guess that would mean the cavaliers would be similarly immortal, possibly self-healing—I think it probably depends, they don’t know as much necromancy, but I wonder if he maybe wanted to have half as many people to command as opposed to the same number he started with, and have them all turn on him, potentially.

C: Although he is making new Lyctors, so it seems like he’s pretty confident in his ability to keep them dependent on him. Although again, Harrow and Ianthe are both younger and so probably easier for him to manipulate.

B: Plus he was starting to run out of them.

J: Yeah. Can we talk about the House of the Sixth now? Because I was so excited that they were back! I almost cried. I was so happy.

N: This book consistently surprises me because it does such amazing things, where you’re trained to think that death is the end, so you lose a character and you’re mourning them, and then they keep finding ways to bring them back. But the fact that Pal was contained in the shard of his skull—

C: And he’s reading this terrible romance novel and writing a sequel to it. I love that so much. It brings me so much joy.

J: When Camilla comes back and is talking to Harrow, and she says, The Cohort took the rest of him away, and I don’t know where they have put him. I don’t want to overstate the case. Like, this is a very clear reference to the Gospel of John, where the angels come to Mary Magdalene, and she says, They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him. And I just feel like that is a very glossable thing, and this feels so much like Shakespeare in the sense that it makes references that we can gloss, and then it makes references that in two years will be completely illegible to people.

C: Yeah! It’s very—like when she pulls out the, in book one, Harrow does—he studied the blade meme! And it’s like, so this is completely a 2019 reference that we will never be able to remember in a few years, but then you have like, John quoting The Little Mermaid and the Hans Christian Anderson, and pulling everything out. It’s so intertextual and referential.

N: When they’re talking to Commander Wake and he calls her “Wake Me Up Inside”—

B: I died at that!
N: There was that, and then the “jail for Mother”—again, I want to table-flip this book every time one of these references comes out.

C: And they never feel completely self-indulgent. They always make contextual sense, which is astonishing to me.

J: That’s the thing! I mean, I think if a future scholar was looking at this book and trying to gloss the references, I think there are so many things that feel very—like you said, feel very contextual and don’t feel like they’re a reference to something. Like the “jail for Mother” reference is a reference to a Patricia Lockwood tweet about her cat.

N: It’s insane.

J: Yeah! And there’s an earlier thing where Ianthe says “I tried and therefore no one should consider me,” which is a reference to basically just a gif.

B: Wasn’t there like a “thank you, next” thing in there too or something?
J: Oh my God, was there? I’m sure I missed it.

B: I think so!

C: And that’s sort of in a way parallels the structure that makes the book so fun, the high-low reference tone of it, where a big part of the pleasure of this book is the way it will have a big overwrought highbrow description of something, and then it’ll puncture with this sort of lowbrow “what the fuck is going on?” And the way that the references follow in that same exact structure is so satisfying on like a very deep level.

B: And she sort of parallels that with the emotional gut punches and then the lines that make you laugh, because—I think it was maybe three lines after the “I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it” was like, typical Gideon irreverence that just made me want to giggle and cry at the same time. I think it’s very smart how she’s able to pull that off.

J: One thing that I loved in this book is that Harrow appears to be having some psychotic features of her life? It really struck home to me how much this book feels like my own experience of mental illness, in that it’s very sort of dire in some places but then in other places, like, this is the stupidest fucking thing that’s ever happened to me.

C: Should we talk about Harrow’s love for The Body? Because I don’t fully know what to do with it, honestly.

B: I don’t think Harrow does either!

C: No one really does! At times it seems like her love for The Body is where she puts all her feelings for everyone she’s ever cared about who’s dead. Like, the ways that it’ll sometimes talk with her mother’s voice, and ever since Gideon’s death it has Gideon’s eyes, which like, we now know mythological reasons for that, but it’s also like she’s projecting Gideon onto it as well.

N: Yeah, I found myself almost weirdly jealous of her love for The Body, in this book, especially I think before we got far enough to know what Gideon’s fate actually was. Part of me was like, How dare you! I know that you were into The Body before Gideon, but look what Gideon did for you! And how can you still be obsessing over The Body? So I had this weird emotional feeling of—she ain’t shit!

C: No, I felt that too! And also with Ianthe, even though I love her with my whole heart. Every time she made a move on Harrow, I was like, Whoa! Step off!

J: Same. Absolutely same.

B: It feels to me sort of like—I know they keep saying like, Harrow is in love with The Body, and they even bring up the like, you’re wasting your time, she’s had the hots for this corpse for forever. But I could honestly read Harrow as aroace, and just like—cause love is not really something that I think the Ninth House seems to really have a good grasp on? And something that Harrow in particular does not seem to have a good grasp on. But to me, I sort of saw it as her thinking that that’s what romantic love might be.

J: Especially because she’s a kid when she encounters The Body for the first time.

B: Also I might be projecting here, so that’s a totally different situation, but.

J: I just totally know what you mean! She has a very hard time conceptualizing what relationships should be like, because she has had a childhood of real trauma and not really a lot of healthy relationships. And so I think that The Body functions for her—whether she’s aroace or not—The Body functions as a safe place for her to pin her emotions to, in a way that real living human people are not.

N: Yeah, and I think some of her worship or fixation with The Body also is that queer girl experience of like, is this person a role model for me? Do I have a crush on them? Do I have a girl-crush on them? Do I want to be them? in addition to what—I agree with what you’re saying about pinning all these other feelings that she doesn’t know where to put them in one place. Cause there is an admiration—I mean, she’s always talking about the physical perfection of The Body. And then, was I understanding correctly that at the end—is that Alecto who is reviving Gideon? Slash, in Harrow’s body?

C: I have like, no idea what happens in the final chapter, I have to say.

B: Me neither.

C: I was like skimming over it before we talked, and the final line where she’s like, Have you worked out who I am? It’s just like—I. No. I have not. I don’t know what is happening here at all.

N: But right before that, I think it’s when Gideon’s like going to the River, has like escaped the Mithraeum, and then kind of comes to and is—there’s somebody talking about the sternum being collapsed and we need to get the heart going, and she sees The Body, and she thinks like, Oh no, your girlfriend has come to crash the party.

J: Yeah, your bullshit dead girlfriend has come to claim you, which is such a good line.

N: It’s so Gideon, so great! And then, I also hadn’t thought about the fact that Harrow’s last moment is back in the tomb that’s empty now. So then I was like, where did Alecto go?? So I love the idea of her, as this book has continued to prove with every character, not being entirely dead.

C: I guess when the full premise of this world is lesbian necromancers in space, we should’ve known from the beginning that everyone’s dead girlfriend was gonna come back to life.

B: Probably!

J: I love it so much and I have to say, the way this book ended made me so excited for the third book. Not that I wouldn’t have been anyway, but it just—the fact that Gideon Prime slash Ortus is dead at the end, and that Pyrrha is in his body? I was just so fucking excited, like I couldn’t contain myself. The idea of going into the third book and it’s all these women just fucking up the Emperor Undying made me feel so happy.

B: There was so much that happened at the end of the book. I know we talked about it earlier, about how there were so many reveals and you can’t really keep track of them all, but I’d totally forgotten that it happened until the second reread. I was like, Oh! Who needs Gideon Prime? No one does! It’s fine!

N: Speaking of the Lyctors, can we talk about the crazy God threesome?

C: Oh my God.

B: YES.

J: Oh my God! I’m so glad you brought this up!

N: I have not been able to stop thinking about it, there’s so many things in this book I can’t stop thinking, but it happened again. And I hadn’t noticed on the first one that Mercy and Augustine are kinda talking through the plan beforehand, and they use the codeword Dios Apate, which I assumed is Latin for something about Let’s fuck God.

C: It’s God deception. I looked it up.

N: Ah, okay. I was hoping it was a little dirtier.

C: I know! Same!

N: Thank you for looking it up. But yeah, it was such a human thing, and it’s like, grossing out the kids, and—so great.

C: I love that Ianthe is just as grossed out as Harrow. Like, Harrow we know is very confused and disconcerted by anything sexual, but Ianthe is always making suggestive remarks, and then when she’s face to face with this, she’s just like, No. No, I absolutely do not want to have any knowledge of this.

J: I feel like I said what the fuck in sixteen different valences while I was reading this book, and when I got to that part, and Augustine had promised to do a distraction, and then his distraction was just fucking everyone in sight—I was just like WHAT! WHAT! The! Fuck!

B: I think the best thing about that, though, is it wasn’t—there was narrative value! Cause it wasn’t the first time it happened, and the first time it happened was like, the reason all of this happened at all! You’re just like, What! Why is a god threesome having this effect on a story??

C: That’s another thing that felt very fanfictiony about this, is that like, the sex is all very character-driven and serves story function in a way that it generally doesn’t in a lot of other kind of writing.

J: I agree, and also I thought that Tamsyn Muir did such a good job of just making things plot-relevant that you thought were weird and annoying at the time? Like, not just the threesome, although the threesome is the most kind of salient example. But in the third person sections, the whole thing of Ortus always doing his epic about Matthias Nonius that somehow becomes plot-relevant at the end, it just felt so—I felt so like I was in the hands of a master, like someone was really, really, really flying this plane.

C: Yeah, that’s one of the deep pleasures of this book. Even when I have no fucking idea what’s happening, and I’m completely lost, I can just sort of relax into the confusion. I’m like, Tamsyn has got me. I do not need to worry about this at all.

J: There’s a part where Gideon is in Harrow’s body, and she gets an envelope from Ianthe that’s like, For Gideon Nav, and Harrow has kept her sunglasses, which is so lovely just on an emotional level. But then it also turns out to be plot-relevant, because Gideon Prime comes back and takes the sunglasses from our Gideon, and puts them on because he’s secretly Pyrrha. Like, it was just so fucking satisfying to read.

B: Ohhh!

N: YES!

B: That just clicked! Oh my God!

N: I thought they belonged to him, and he’d like, left them in his dalliances with Commander Wake, but no! I—you’re right!

B: Ohhhh, that’s what I thought—ohhhhhh. Why is Tamsyn Muir so much smarter than me? I hate this!

J: I just like, today, as I was walking over to have brunch with my sister and brother-in-law, I was reading the book, and I was like, wait, what color were his eyes before? And I had to go back and check. Gideon Prime’s eyes are green, but when he shows up and takes our Gideon’s sunglasses, his eyes are brown, because he’s Pyrrha!

N: And he does it just so quickly, I think they describe it as a little wincing excuse me face and just takes the sunglasses and nobody questions it, because they’re all in the middle of all the other shit that’s happening.

B: Someone has to get exploded every five seconds.

J: I really feel like I need a concordance for this book, where just I can look up—like an index—where anyone’s eyes are mentioned, where I can sort of return to that page, and when any of the Saints are mentioned I can return to that page.

C: One of the big reasons I’m looking forward to this book coming out is not just so I can talk to everyone about it, but also so that like, a really obsessed fandom person will put together a goddamn wiki and I can look things up instead of, like, turning back and forth and being like, I do not remember this detail! This book is too smart for me!

B: I mean, I even just wanna have a physical copy so I can refer back to the cast of characters, like with everyone being on there, and just like, put little notes on it with like, eye color or something, so I can check it.

C: Oh my God, I’m gonna do that now.

J: So okay, someone mentioned this earlier, and I would like to come back to it. At the very end of the book, Camilla is talking to someone, and the person says, “Have you figured out who I am yet?” and Camilla says no. Does anyone here feel like they have figured who that person is?

B: I have no fucking clue.

C: This is deafening silence. No, absolutely not.

N: She describes herself as the person who lives with her, so I didn’t know if it was in her head, and so I was like, is it a revenant? Is it Commander Wake? Did she somehow jump from Cytherea’s body to Camilla—but how?

C: Oh, I got an impression from reading it—and I may have just fully made this up—that it was some sort of weird combination of Harrow and Gideon. Like I think the exercises she does made me think that? But maybe I fully made that up!

J: Let me tell y’all my theory, and y’all can tell me what you think. Okay, so I’m looking at the Dramatis Personae in the beginning of the book. All of the Emperor’s Saints have cavaliers with surnames that suggest the House that they’re in, and the one that I couldn’t figure out was Cassiopeia the First, her cavalier’s named Nigella Shodash. So I wasn’t sure which House that was meant to be. However, the only House that’s missing is the Sixth.

C: Oooh!

J: Yeah. And Cassiopeia is said to be very like, brilliant. And at the end of the book, she is described as having grey, lambent eyes, which is how they describe Palamedes’s eyes.

B: Huh.

J: So I think—I hope and believe that it might be Cassiopeia? Possibly?

N: Maybe!

C: That is next-level. I’m very into it.

J: I really want it to be, because I think that would be very confusing—when Palamedes eventually comes back to life as I dearly hope that he will, cause he’s my second-favorite character.

C: My question is, since she is doing cavalier exercises rather than necromantic exercises, is there a possibility that it’s Cassiopeia’s cavalier?

J: I’d also be fine with that. I just want to be right that it’s the House of the Sixth.

C: I mean, I’m very into this idea.

J: Because I love Palamedes, and I miss him, and he’s described very often as having grey and lambent eyes.

N: Yeah, I definitely thought it was some reference to him. But sorry. Dumb question. Was it Camilla staring at her own reflection with his eyes, or was it—

J: Oh, shit! Was it? Oh God, you could be right. See, this is the problem. The author is too clever for me.

B: Did we ever get an explanation for why he specifically requested that Harrow give him—like, reshape the bone to be something with—

C: Articulation.

B: Articulation, there we go. Did we get an explanation for that?

C: I assume he’s gonna have to use that to recreate his body somehow.

N: I assumed he might want to write stuff down, which seems like a very Sixth thing. But probably some combo.

J: I just reread Gideon the Ninth, and I just felt so fond of him. He’s such a morally upright nerd.

B: He pairs well with Camilla.

C: I have never—the level to which eye color is so plot-significant in this book is like, the most I’ve seen it since in Harry Potter, every single person who ever met Harry was like, “You have your mother’s eyes.”

N: And that feels so fanfictiony! Like when you think about people getting married in—or in like fantasy in fanfic where it’s like, well this child has my husband’s eyes and the boy has my eyes, and—it felt like that similar obsession where they’re, like you said, they’re trying to attach meaning to it.

C: And that she does that without ever falling into that slightly trashy tic where people always describe eyes as being either jewel-colored or candy-colored. Like, chocolate eyes, sapphire eyes, whiskey eyes. Like you know that sort of writing tic that always drags things down a little bit, she has so many eye color descriptions, and she never falls into that trap once.

N: Exactly.

J: I was truly murdered by the end of this book, where suddenly Gideon’s golden eyes become incredibly plot-significant, and every character who sees her is just completely unraveled by the realization that she is the Emperor’s child.

B: I definitely wanted to just have a flowchart when that whole conversation was going down.

C: Yeah, I almost want to do—what are they called in high school biology, like a Punnett Square? I wanted to do one of those that whole conversation.

J: And I really struggled with it because you find out that Gideon Prime has done, essentially, the same thing that Harrow has done, where his cavalier is still kind of alive in there, and she has to conceal her eyes from everyone else, because she’s still alive in there and once Gideon Prime dies, she’s the only person in possession of that body. I really had to think about that very hard.

N: But I love how like, Tamsyn has established all those rules and now is exploding them and is just like, Yeah! Each of these Lyctors are so different from one another that they don’t actually all follow the same theorems, and so now we’re getting all these loopholes.

C: She’s very good at setting up magical systems that have specific rules and regulations so that every battle scene becomes a character scene because it requires strategies that have to be driven by the characters’ personalities to pull off. She’s so careful about it, and it always blows me away.

N: Definitely.

J: She does such a good job of marrying the plot significance to the emotional significance.

B: I really did, the first time I read it, I had to like, sit down in a quiet room for about twenty minutes and just exist and try to remember what my life was like before I read that book. I think I read this around Thanksgiving, and my parents are like, oh yeah! Come talk with us!, and I’m like, BUT THIS BOOK! I can’t deal with other people right now! I need some time. See, this is why—your last bullet point is what our hopes and dreams are for Alecto the Ninth, and I have none. Well, cause I feel like this book was so unlike what I could’ve possibly predicted, when I finished reading Gideon the Ninth, and it just took me on an amazing, painful but worthwhile journey that I don’t even want to try and predict what she’ll do in the third book. Whatever she does, it’ll be better than what I can possibly imagine.

N: I do wonder what tense it’s gonna be in. Like, are we gonna get full first person? Are we gonna go back to third?

C: Are we gonna be in Alecto’s head? Because that would be very jarring, but I trust her to do it.

N: Exactly! This person who feels so foreign but also increasingly familiar because we learned all these jumbled bits about her.

J: What I’ve written in my notes for this bullet point is “just an unimaginable amount of murder.”

N: Well, cause God didn’t die! We got some unresolved shit to work through.

J: Yeah! And there’s so many women that I’m so here for like—Pyrrha is in Ortus’s body, I posit that either Cassiopeia or her cavalier is with Camilla. Then there’s also Camilla. Harrow, Gideon, and Alecto. There’s so many women that I want to just kill people so much.

N: Yeah. Ianthe’s still alive, because she fished God out of the River and even though it seems like very clearly taking a side, like I still want to know what’s behind that. And as far as we know, Corona’s still alive, so I feel like that reunion has to happen in some regard.

J: God, yes.

N: Or be cruelly ripped away! But somehow resolved.

J: I dearly also want Palamedes and Camilla to reunite, because I love their friendship so much.

C: I need for there to be like, a moment of reckoning between each of the cavalier/necromancer pairs. I don’t necessarily need for it to be in any particular emotional register, I just want to see it happen, basically. It’s so foundational and there’s so much betrayal in the case of the Lyctors, and deep profound trust in the case of the pairs that didn’t become Lyctors, that I just need to see it paid off.

N: Definitely. Do we feel like we need to go back to any of the Nine Houses? Cause so much of this took place—what, forty billion lightyears away, or whatever?

C: I mean, I would be interested in seeing them, but I don’t necessarily have to. I feel about them kind of like the Districts in The Hunger Games, like, it’d be cool, but I’m not wedded to it.

N: You know, it’s funny, when I first read this, I think I was like, misreading one of the things that God or John says to Harrow at first, when they have the coffin that has Cytherea’s body in it, and I misread it because I thought it was like, we’re gonna drop off each of the bodies at their planets, and I was like, is this Catching Fire? Like, is this the victory tour? And then it quickly became clear that that’s not what they were gonna do, because we found out about the Resurrection Beasts. But at first I was like, are we just gonna—yeah, go back to each of the planets and kinda say like, Hey! Sorry your tributes died! Or we can’t find them!

J: I mean, I would say the reunions that I want very intensely are Harrow and Gideon, obviously, and Camilla and Palamedes, because Camilla is so, so—like, loves Palamedes so much, I just want them to see each other again and talk again.

C: My God. I’m kind of tearing up at this idea.

J: I am too because he also loves her so much. I mean, what brought me in on Palamedes in the first book is that the Second House challenges him and Camilla defeats them handily, and he’s so angry that they’ve put her through this at all.

N: Yeah, he doesn’t take anything about her for granted, the way that you see other necromancers do with their cavaliers.

J: Yeah! They’re really truly best friends, and I’m really really really really here for it.

B: I think that’s part of why I love the Sixth House so much, is because of that bond between them and it not being romantic, it just being—I care more about this person than anyone else in the world, and I will do anything for this person.

C: And I remember it took me a little while to realize that it was completely unromantic. Like at one point, Gideon says “oh Palamedes is a perfect fool over Camilla the Sixth,” and I sort of took that as meaning, oh, okay, they’re in some sort of romantic relationship. He’s a perfect fool over her because he’s like smitten by her. And then when it became clear that no, he was in love with Dulcinea, I had to recalibrate my expectations and be like, I feel like I’ve never really seen this in a book before! A place where someone can be a perfect fool over someone else and just consider them completely wonderful and important and the most important person in the world to them—but have it very explicitly be unromantic.

J: I don’t know. I get very emotional about that. It’s very very very very very very lovely to me, and I’m really glad that that kind of relationship is represented in these books. All right, y’all. Any other hopes and dreams for Alecto the Ninth?

C: I trust Tamsyn to do whatever she’s going to do with Harrow and Gideon, and I’m sure it will be profoundly emotionally satisfying to me. But like, I ship it so deeply. I would love some payoff of whatever kind.

N: I don’t even know what payoff is gonna be, because there’s a part of me, yeah, that’s like, are Harrow and Gideon just gonna be kind of ships in the night, as souls that never actually really interact with each other again? And I could see—again, because this is a series built on death and permanence—I could totally see that happening, and I feel like I’d have to just nod and take it, but I’m hoping against hope that there’s some sort of closure, even if it’s just for a minute together.

J: Well, and also, don’t forget, Gideon’s body has not been found, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that Gideon’s soul be put back in her body.

N: Oh shit! You’re right!

C: Yeah, but what of her vacant body, though? Because we’ve been told that an empty body draws in things to take it over, right?

B: Oh, no.

J: Yeah, we don’t know!

B: Oh, no.

J: I’ve been thinking about it constantly.

N: And also they said they went over Canaan House and didn’t find anything, so it’s like—does the Blood of Eden have her body? Is she being preserved somewhere?

C: Maybe she’s the new The Body!

N: Ooooo.

J: Another thing that I really question is: So, Commander Wake appears to have been pulling the strings in the first book, and she’s the commander of the Blood of Eden people, and Camilla is with them now, it seems. But the Blood of Eden people, if they were pulling the strings in the first book, the Blood of Eden people killed Dulcinea, who Palamedes was in love with, so I’m like, very curious what that’s gonna be like when he eventually, I hope, returns. Because he does not seem like a person who’d be like, oh, you killed my loved one! No worries! We have the same goals. We’ll just move on.

N: Well, that was something with the whole introduction of the Blood of Eden in this book where, because we started the first book being like, this is Gideon, this is this necromantic universe, this myriad, this is what life is like. And like, I’m not anybody who’s in any way gothy, so it took a while to emotionally get into the book, but I did. And we kinda continued that, and at first God seemed like this sympathetic figure, and then by the time he started talking about, Oh yeah, no, I have these rebel insurgents who’ve been bothering me forever, part of me had this moment of like, Oh no! We’re the bad guys! And I loved that—again, it was like the Gideon “he was looking at me” reveal, where I was like, I don’t know why my brain didn’t cop to this earlier, but it was a sense of like, oh there are ostensibly good guys doing something else as a ragtag rebellion through the Empire. So I’m hoping—I would love a little bit of maybe some of that perspective shift in Alecto, if it is Alecto working with Blood of Eden or—I mean, we’ll see Camilla, and it seems like she’s on that side—to get a different recontextualization of what it’s like to be these small people who have broken away from the society that otherwise has everybody else in its necromantic grip.

C: I’m so excited, you guys. I don’t know how I’m gonna wait for this book. Can it just be here already?

J: It feels physically impossible to wait for at least another year to experience the third book.

N: It feels insane, yeah, to think that it’s that long of a wait.

B: This is what suffering is.

C: But that’s how long it’s gonna take to fully understand what just happened in Harrow the Ninth.

N: Well, I’m so excited to—I don’t know if you guys have been checking out the fanfiction that’s grown up around this on Archive of Our Own. Like it was so interesting to read a bunch of Gideon fanfic and see what different people are going for, and then a couple people started writing stuff based just on the excerpt that had been released, and some of them seemed to have some decent guesses just operating off, what, a chapter, if that? And so I’ll be curious once this book is actually out in the world in June and everybody else is doing what we’re doing of this way of like, fuck, we’re waiting so long for Alecto, I’ll be really curious to see how the fandom continues to extrapolate out and what their guesses are, and how it kind of fills that time.

B: I read some of the stuff that got posted for Yuletide, and I think at least two or three of them, I just softly whispered to myself “Oh no” when I saw how they were treating what was gonna happen after, and I was like, “you’re not ready, oh noooooo.”

J: To be fair, no one could be ready.

B: No, and I did a very mean thing, once again. Katsucon this weekend, and I sort of just took my Nook and I just put it on the bed between me and my Gideon, and I was like, there’s a book on there if you would like to potentially read the first chapter. I can’t stop you. And she got to the list of all the Lyctors, and she just lost it at me, because she was like, XXXX? I don’t even get a goddamn name? What the hell?, and I said, keeping a straight face and not saying anything, and then I couldn’t say anything when people— We had five people recognize us, which I was very excited about, but someone was asking us, she was like, oh, so is Alecto in this book? And I sat there, and I’m like, I dunno! She’s like, well we know they have to be around it sometime, we know the title of the next book, I was like, Do we know that? I dunno! No one is ready for this book!

J: God, I’m certainly not ready for the third book, like, not at all.

C: It’s just physically impossible to be ready for it. We never will be.

J: I think it helps to be Catholic and crazy, and I am both of those things, but I still don’t think with either of those qualities in place, that I’m in any way prepared for the third book.

N: Me neither, but I think we’ll start bumping up against it a month or two before, a couple months beforehand, and yeah, I think with time, it’ll suddenly be like, all right! I don’t know what’s coming, but my body is ready!

J: Well, certainly I’m looking forward to hearing what other people—like, other people’s theories about what is going on in Harrow the Ninth, because I don’t think I’m the most careful reader, so I’m excited to see what more careful readers think.

C: These books are so fun to read also that I always find myself speeding through and swallowing them down in these giant gulps, and I don’t really take in exactly what’s happening with much carefulness, so I’m interested in what a period of slower rereading will reveal.

J: I’m just gonna say this. I reread Gideon the Ninth in preparation for this podcast, and on page 60, Harrow says, “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bonemeal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”

N: AAAAAAA

C: She has had this planned for so long!

N: Harrow, you crazy bitch!

C: What a beautiful, demented genius!

B: This is why she’s my favorite!

J: My God, I love her so much. All right, well, this has been lovely. Y’all have been absolute treasures. Bria, where can the people find you online?

B: You guys can find me online @chaosbria on Twitter and Instagram; I’m usually talking about Dragon Age.

C: I’m on Twitter @constancegrady, and my articles are published at Vox.com with a V not an S.

N: I’m on Twitter @NatalieZutter, and yeah, my stuff can be found on Tor.com, Den of Geek, and elsewhere.

J: And thank y’all so much for listening, and until next time: One flesh, one end.

C: Oh God!

B: One flesh one ennnnnnnnd! Why!

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