Reviews with content warning for Emotional abuse - Harrow the Ninth

I've never read such a fascinating, brain-breaking, frustrating, stomach-turning, compelling, off-putting, word-feast of an epic science fantasy horror mystery in my life. Muir is a heck of a writer (the humor! the viscera! the metaphor! the meter! the characters! the action!) but I'd have to read both Gideon and Harrow again to feel like I understand enough to say more. And I'm not likely to do that.

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anxiousnachos's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional

5.0

Where do I even start to review this absolute masterpiece of a second novel? It has taken me an embarrassing amount of time to pick up Harrow and I’ll fully admit it’s because I wasn’t quite as in love with Gideon the Ninth as I expected to be. But I saw this book in the library and thought what the hell, it’s time. And what a fucking idiot I’ve been when I could have made this book my entire personality OVER A YEAR AGO if I’d only read it then.

This book is a master class in point of view, plot structure, horror as comedy, the exceptional use of gothic genre, and divinity. I’d like to discuss each of these in turn.

Point of view
I think second person POV gets a real bad rep in the book community but I am a big fan of it, it’s one of my favourite tools Muir used in this book. I think this showed the same expertise that Jemisin showed in her use of second-person POV in the The Broken Earth trilogy. This tense creates such an element of mystery and omnipotence and horror - it is a POV for horror and it is used expertly in Harrow.

Structure
I know lots of people found Harrow’s structure confusing, but somehow I actually found this one less confusing than Gideon. Maybe because of my love of books with timelines that jump around and you kind of just accept not knowing what’s going on and go along for the ride?? But I loved not knowing what the fuck was happening, loved the timeline structure that gave us past and future Harrrow, I thought it allowed us a much deeper sense of who Harrow was and a much closer connection to her which made the events of the book so much more horrific for the reader and so much more unbearable in their grief.

Horror as comedy
Have I ever read a funnier book? I definitely can’t quite remember ever laughing at one quite so much as this. Page after page, I just could not stop laughing. The soup scene absolutely undid me, and I want it to get the love it deserves as peak humour and utter genius.

Gothic
Where do I even begin? This entire book is a masterclass in the idea of gothic genre as haunting; Harrow as haunted by past, by trauma, by loss, by the genocide of her conception, by grief. It it fantastic, and it is so deeply traumatic to read, I never wanted to stop and yet it also felt like I was being repeatedly punched in the chest, and then I read the author's note and it made sense. Muir gets Harrow because Muir has lived Harrow.

Divinity
The twist to such has intimate relationship with, and worship of, divinity in Harrow was an interesting choice but one which I loved because I am of course always obsessed with the portrayal of religion in SFF. I am deeply looking forward to delving closer into divinity on reread as I feel this will be an area that so much more is noticed on reread. But all I can say is I loved the fatherly vibes, I loved the subtle darkness below the surface, I loved the relationships God had with each of his companions and how that manipulated the relationships they had with each other, I loved loved loved it.

This book is a masterpiece of gothic science fantasy, it will emotionally haunt me as Harrow is haunted by a 10,000 year old corpse.

Content warnings: hallucinations, depictions of severe mental health crisis, grief, mass child death, genocide, graphic blood and gore, war, body horror, vomit, self-harm (for magic), graphic descriptions of corpses, murder, necrophilia, sex, death of parent, death of loved one, suicide, physical abuse, emotional abuse, amputation

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Finished it with 3 minutes left of sapphic September to spare!! A MASTERPIECE. Full review incoming after I sleep.

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emilyplun's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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hidemybook's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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jayecard's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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cattails's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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jkpiowa's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

The first book in this series, Gideon the Ninth, is known for being extremely confusing until everything sort of clears up in the last chapters of the book. Harrow the Ninth is the same, except I was left with even more questions at the end than I was with Gideon.

This book picks up immediately after Gideon and is not remotely a standalone story. The story is intentionally left obscure and confusing until the ending, where it is revealed this obscurity is a piece of the plot. The ending is a cliffhanger, though I don't know if it's a cliffhanger that will be picked up in Nona the Ninth, or if it's just a cliffhanger ending to Harrow's story.

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lolajh's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

What a curious little book this is! This was my second or third read I can’t quite remember but I have to say that rereading it and doing a deep dive online of other people explaining this book helped a ton with me understanding it lmao. I really love and appreciate the delving of the magic system and world in this book that is necessary to become more familiar with the world of the series, a tiny addition to the book that really helped me with visualising just the setting and how necromancy works.

The conclusion I’ve come to about this book is that the chapters in second person are the real timeline

and in the perspective of Gideon just like…sitting in harrow’s brain I guess lmao

and the chapters in third person are an alternate timeline existing

as a Bubble

in the River

that Harrow (unintentionally?) created when trying to forget Gideon. This timeline overwrites Harrow’s memories, and involves Ortus never dying in the first book and being Harrow’s cavalier when they were invited to Canaan house instead of Gideon, who Harrow doesn’t remember.

In real time, Harrow, alongside Ianthe, struggle to live up to the other Lyctors around them,

due to Harrow’s very incomplete Lyctorhood that’s only half-consumed Gideon’s soul, and Ianthe’s incorrectly reattached arm that makes it hard to fight.

The pair of them are being trained to join the other Lyctors in fighting one specific Resurrection Beast (the collective soul of a planet killed all at once) that hunts down the Emperor and his Lyctors for the sins they committed into turning into Lyctors. Because Resurrection Beasts mostly reside in the River where necromancy can’t be performed, Harrow and Ianthe have to learn how to be physically capable of fighting without their powers, which is why they struggle so much.

On top of this, Harrow has to deal with her strange memories, and murder attempts

performed on her by Gideon the First—or “G1deon” as I will refer to him in this—under John’s orders to “scare her” into consuming her cavalier’s soul properly. Harrow thinks for a lot of this book that G1deon’s name is also Ortus, like the name of the person she thinks was the cavalier she consumed, but because of “the work” (a brain surgery/lobotomy that Harrow did on herself with Ianthe’s help to remove her memories of Gideon so that she wouldn’t consume her soul), Harrow mistook G1deon’s name to also be Ortus.

Whenever the chapters of those “memories” recited in third person come up, it is Harrow in real time revisiting them

i.e. through travelling to that Bubble in the River that she’s not aware she’s in, and as she does she receives signs from the characters within them such as the Body, a servant, Abigail and Magnus, who throughout different parts of her memories tell her “This isn’t how it happens.” The letters about eggs that weave their way into her memories are also alluding her to the fact that her memories aren’t real.

Instead of Cytherea being in the Canaan House of this Bubble, “The Sleeper”, who is the soul of anti-necromancer ex Blood of Eden captain and also Gideon’s mother Awake, is actively invading the Bubble in real time in an attempt to kill all the necromancers there. Eventually all hell breaks loose and it becomes more explicit that this Bubble is a real thing Harrow is in, and not just memories she’s looking back on.

“My soul is under seige, and I overwrote my real memories with a ghost-filled pocket dimension, which has not apparently been co-opted by some kind of poltergeist.”

The Sleeper continues to invade the Bubble with potential to hurt the real-life souls of the people in it, like Abigail, Magnus, Ortus and Dulcinea, who are choosing to stay in the River with Harrow to fight the Sleeper rather than letting their souls move on. I really love how as Harrow starts to remember Gideon again, she starts seeing her everywhere in the Bubble, where in every single alternate timeline she comes across she sees Gideon there in every single one. It becomes really apparent in this book how much Harrow loves Gideon too; it’s not a one-sided thing at all and I really hope Harrow eventually differentiates the love she has for Alecto and the love she has for Gideon and she realises that her love for Gideon is so much more raw and real. She’s practically gone to hell and back for this girl, sacrificing her own life at the end of this to allow Gideon to live in Harrow’s body. She barely even thinks it over; once she realises “the work” worked and some of Gideon’s soul was still intact, she chose to stay in the River in the Locked Tomb there where Gideon’s made up magazines were, trapping herself in Alecto’s body, because she thought it would give Gideon a chance to live. They’ve both sacrificed themselves now; they’re even, so PLEASE Tamsyn, let them BE TOGETHER.

It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

The process of “the work” is also

how Gideon, or what’s left of her unconsumed soul within Harrow, is able to take control of Harrow’s body later in the book after Mercymorn mercy-kills her so she doesn’t die to the Beast. This is where Gideon learns her father is John and also that her mother Wake, was the captain of anti-necromancer group Blood of Eden and was attempting to open the Locked Tomb with newborn Gideon because she had John’s blood and could undo the blood wards, allowing access into the Tomb and being able to release Alecto, John’s cavalier, who achieved perfect Lyctorhood with John without either of them having to die and now one cannot die without the other also dying. Wake didn’t achieve this of course, as she died before reaching the Ninth with Gideon, but still this fact about John achieving perfect Lyctorhood is found out by the other Lyctors at the same time as Gideon and Ianthe. Gideon has yellow eyes, which are directly hereditary and both Wake and John did not (appear to) have these eyes when the Lyctors knew they were the parents of Gideon. Wake isn’t a necromancer so that rules out her eye colour being able to change to what it is now, and leaves John being the only one Gideon’s eyes could have come from. The Lyctors also thought up until this moment John had never had a cavalier. The Lyctors remember Alecto having yellow eyes before she was locked in the tomb, which means she got John’s yellow eyes when they Lyctor-bonded before the Lyctors were even resurrected yet, and John got her black eyes as he does now. And because they were both alive whilst Lyctor-bonded, that meant John found a way to do this without killing a cavalier yet never told his Lyctors and watched them kill their cavaliers. Whether the Lyctor-bonding John and Alecto did would even be possible to replicate is a whole other thing entirely, but regardless, there’s that explained, so that’s why the Lyctors go apeshit on John and try to kill him in the River. Why Ianthe saves him, I’m still not really sure, even after reading Nona. She’s the one character you can’t truly rely on or predict anything about (I love her)

Overall this probably WILL be the most fucking confusing book you’ve ever read, and unfortunately it does require multiple rereads to truly understand even on top of researching what’s actually going on. Even I am still very much confused about a lot of things, but hopefully with each reread it will get better 😃 Good luck

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