Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Harrow the Ninth

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Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

88 reviews

devirtualized's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense 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

5.0

This is a very special book. And by book I mean long, mind-bending, utterly beautiful poem - or love letter - or both.

I feel like I don’t have high enough praise to give this but I will try. This prose is otherworldly. It is a surreal and devastating painting of grief and it is a derisive remark and a dad joke all in one. There really is not a single word that goes to waste.

Harrow is an intriguing & exquisite character, warped by pain and unanswered questions, but still resolute and sincere. She’s sharply clever but also, endearingly, dumb-as-rocks and a little or a lot pathetic because of it. And she’s kind of impossible not to love. Like practically everyone Harrow meets, I too have a strong case of Nonagesimitis.

The character dynamics are unbelievably tantalizing, incomprehensible (complimentary) and endlessly entertaining - and much the same can be said for the plot.

I think I probably have a lot more to say. I have many questions too but I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

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belladonnashrike's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense slow-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

3.0

so I think reading this sequel has summed up my feelings on how muir writes. she comes off as an amateur writer - whether that’s true or not, I have no idea, but that’s the root of all my critiques. I’m not a fan of the humor in this series, but even more so, all the characters (except for Harrow) have the same sense of humor, even when you would expect them not to, which sort of cheapens the dialogue and their individual characterization. the one (main) character that I feel does not share this quality is Harrowhark, who is written as the inverse of Gideon, so of course she won’t have the Gideon-like humor. I think Harrow is the best written character in the series and she is certainly my favorite which is why I think I enjoyed this book way more than the first. despite that, the fact that she is basically a Gideon foil feels a little lazy especially when you look at the dialogue. I love Harrow but I wish her traits and personality was independent of Gideon. I enjoyed Harrow’s perspective

but once it shifted back to Gideon’s (which I KNEW was going to happen… I hated the second person format but then realized very early on that Gideon was most likely not actually dead and she was speaking for Harrow) perspective, I felt mildly annoyed. I don’t dislike Gideon at all, but I’d simply rather not read things from her perspective, especially in first person. she’s fine as a side character! I just really do not like her sense of humor and again, it cheapens the story for me. especially when God - her father - said that very ridiculous, unnecessary dad joke upon meeting her. I legitimately rolled my eyes and sighed. I just can’t escape this sense of humor even when Harrow is leading the book!

much more. she is a very interesting character and I do have a lot of love for her. the worldbuilding got SO much better in this book, but it’s not perfect. some things are still left unsaid or as loose threads (which I feel is not a part of the mystery and definitely attributed to what I imagine is inexperienced writing). I am still invested in the story despite my critiques (I just find the concept so fascinating - I desperately wish that the execution was better) so I’ll be continuing on with the series. I hope Harrow is in these next couple books because I do adore her and would certainly miss her if she was absent from the storyline.

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nonsense's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny 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

4.5

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thecatconstellation's review against another edition

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adventurous dark 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? It's complicated

4.5

A wild, confusing, horrifying, wonderful ride. You have to go into this knowing you will not know what the fuck is going on half the time, and even when you figure out what’s going on, there’s still so much we don’t know.

I love the tone, especially in the second half. The humor and references sprinkled in kill me. “…none House, with left grief.” made me LOL.

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lumberelk's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.75

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elizmoe's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

5.0

Tamsyn Muir, meet me in the pit. So I can give you a <i>hug</i>. And then sue you for emotional damages.

i'm screaming, i'm crying, i'm throwing up even more than harrow in the first 5 chapters of this book. gideon and harrow have forever altered my brain chemistry. i understand that these books are perhaps not for everyone, but they are definitely for <i>me</i>; every reality-bending, viscerally disgusting, brow-furrowing-inducing moment of this stupid lesbian necromancer and her stupider lesbian cavalier were for me, and i am wretchedly grateful.

too early to say for sure, but this book may have ruined me for other books? we'll see, but i have a bad feeling that anything else i will read that contains any of the following:

necromancy
swordplay
space
nonlinear storytelling
unreliable narrator(s)
enemy lesbians

will just leave me wondering why that book can't be her*.

*the locked tomb series

also the payoff of this book is CRAZY. if you are like 20% through and not seeing the vision and considering DNF, i urge you to carry on even if the 500 pages feel daunting. you won't believe your eyes when shit starts coming together, because so many pieces do. even pieces that don't, i am confident will be explained in the next two books, as there were many many setups from book 1 that made for some incredible reveals in this book.

i have so much more to say about this book but most of it is yelling. even the occasional ill-advised meme inserts couldn't mar this book for me! and that's pretty insane!!

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starryfran's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.5

The first half of the book felt rather slow, the second half was action packed. I read the 2nd half in less then 2 days

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le_mur's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious sad slow-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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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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challenging slow-paced

3.5

It’s been three months since I read Gideon the Ninth, so I was prepared for it to take a little bit to get back into the story. I was also expecting it to be a little less enjoyable at the beginning because I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow last book and I knew she would be the main character this time. So I was prepared to have a rough start.

What I was not prepared for was absolute incomprehensibility.

Some books feel like giant puzzles where the story keeps handing you pieces and it isn’t until the end where you figure out how they all fit together. This book does not feel like that. This book feels like it handed you a large box full of pulpy sludge, then at 74% of the way through the book it casts the spell to turn the sludge into puzzle pieces at which point they come together fairly easily.

If 74% feels like an oddly specific number, that’s because I checked. I looked at the time stamp for when the book started to make sense, because it took a very long time. The first three-quarters of the book are almost entirely incomprehensible. They go hard into the unreality and “unreliable narrator is unreliable because she can’t remember and isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real.” It goes back and forth between Harrow’s new life as a Lyctor and a retelling of book one where Gideon doesn’t exist. The timelines are all mixed up. It’s hard to tell when events are actually supposed to be taking place, and I’m pretty sure both timelines are told out of order anyway (but there’s no temporal markers so it’s hard to tell). It’s a crapshoot if you can figure out who’s speaking or even in the scene at the start. And the bulk of it is told in second person, which really threw me for the first few hours and never stopped feeling weird and jarring.

And after all that, can you guess the moment that made me pause the book and stare into space asking myself if I really just heard what I thought I just heard? It wasn’t the unexpected betrayal, or the murder attempts, or the body under the bed or the weird blood river or the fact that God’s name is John. It was the moment where God was explaining a potential galaxy-ending apocalypse to Harrow and, right in the middle of a serious conversation, made an absolutely serious none pizza left beef reference. Out of all the incomprehensible nonsense that came before, that was the moment where I stopped the book, reconsidered my reading choices, and started wondering what kind of person Tamsyn Muir is to put a fucking meme reference in her elaborate and serious book.

Once I was paying attention, there was a surprising amount of memes and internet culture referenced in a gory and intense drama about necromancers in space. These included a “She wants the D” joke, a pun on the word “barista”, an honest-to-goodness “Hi, _, I’m dad” joke, and references to bone hurting juice and Miette. Am I supposed to be taking this seriously? Every single other thing in the book is very serious – and yet there are no less than five meme/joke references. What am I supposed to think?

I very nearly DNF’d this early on. Gideon was my favorite character and she wasn’t there. I didn’t really like Harrow that much in book one when she was badass, and I liked her even less when she was spending much of her time unconscious and not doing anything when she was awake. The other Lyctors were mean, standoffish, and incredibly unlikeable, and the Emperor was stiff and bland whenever he was on page. And even though I was spending a lot of brainpower trying to figure out what the hell was going on, there was zero plot whatsoever. Harrow wasn’t even doing anything – other people around her did stuff, but she did nothing except walk around, be confused about her own memories, and see things that weren’t there, interspersed with retold scenes from book one, except they were the scenes where very little happened and had no Gideon. There wasn’t even any interesting settings to explore, since instead of cool and creepy planets, this book takes place almost exclusively on a largely nondescript spaceship. Up until about halfway through, I really didn’t like this book.

But I stuck it out, mainly because I wanted to see if I was right in my suspicions (and hopes) that the end of book one would get undone in some way. And around the halfway point, I warmed up a bit to Harrow and the barest hint of a plot kicked in. So I felt mildly validated in pushing through the first half (which was about 10 hours, it’s an almost 20-hour audiobook) and kept reading.

Then the book hit the 74% mark and went from zero to sixty over the course of a few minutes. The book cast the spell that turned my box of fibrous sludge into puzzle pieces, I started slamming those pieces together as fast as my brain could whir, Harrow started to actually do things, a plot (of a sort) finally kicked into gear, and the last 26% of the book was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. I got some of the answers I wanted from book one, I got some answers to questions I didn’t even know I had that just added more twists, there was action, there was drama, there were surprises, some of my suspicions about book one’s ending were validated and some of them were not. It was great.

Was it worth the first half being unenjoyable and another quarter being mediocre? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to make of this book. The last 26% was amazing. The first half was terrible. The book seemed to skip engaging characters or intriguing plot and go straight for “if they don’t understand what’s happening, they’ll want to read on and find out,” but then overdid it so hard that it tipped over into obnoxious and frustrating. But also that ending answered a lot of my questions from book one, which is a large part of what I wanted out of this book, and came with some really stellar action sequences towards the end.

This review is very long because this is a very long book and I do not know what to make of it in the least. I think the first three-quarters could have been cut down to half its length, easily, without harming the story and probably making it better. I pushed through reading the whole thing and I don’t know if it was worth it. The confusing thing is that I definitely didn’t dislike this book. I don’t think I liked it, either. And I’m not even ambivalent about it. I’m having some kind of feeling about Harrow the Ninth, but I have no idea what. My opinions are about as incomprehensible as the majority of this book. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book. Maybe? I’m gonna need some time to untangle the disaster of whatever I feel about this one first.

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barrybj's review against another edition

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medium-paced

5.0

what. the fuck.

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