A review by morgob
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

4.0

Okay, right off the bat I need to say that this book was not nearly as good as the first one. Gideon was amazing and fun to read and engaging. Comparatively, this book was its polar opposite: confusing, difficult to read, and very little happens until the last part of the book. That being said, there were some enjoyable things about this book. Trying to figure out what's going on before you're told what's going on is always entertaining, even when it's a story festered with lies and confusion throughout the whole thing. Harrow is an interesting character, just not as interesting or amusing as Gideon. Nowhere near as fun to read. The thing that threw me off at first was that the whole story was written in second person. Since when do you find a story that's in second person?! It was strange up until the end. The stranger part was the "flashbacks" to Canaan House, relaying events that just didn't happen. I read the first book a while ago, so I'll admit it took me a couple of chapters in that point of view to figure out that these things just did not happen in the first book. They're remembered incorrectly. I thought I was remembering things wrong from the first book for a while, but then I realized Harrow's just crazy.
Okay, now for the spoiler bits. The ending completely confused me. Is the emperor dead? Is everyone going to die then because the sun died? Whose father is who???? There was a bit at the end where they explained someone's parentage, but there's like three potential fathers and one of them is technically a woman. Confusing, right? So Gideon has some pretty important parents, but I'm still not sure which ones they are. Also, I am not entirely sure what happened to both her and Harrow at the end. There was a revelation where the lyctors find out it's possible to keep your cavalier alive during the lyctoring process, and that God was lying to them about it. So I'm almost wondering if Gideon will be able to come back. But then Harrow and Gideon both made some mention of closing their eyes and either dying or going to sleep, and we don't hear from them again. Confusing. So Harrow and Gideon could both be dead, or one of them is, or neither of them are. And Gideon's parents could be basically a Punnett square of possibilities. I was able to figure out that Harrow was suppressing--or removing, I guess--her memories of Gideon pretty early on, basically at the beginning where there's a flashback of her talking to Ortus in a scene that did not happen, and his name was kind of blurred or written oddly, so I figured she was getting rid of Gideon because she couldn't handle the grief and couldn't handle losing her. The story itself was interesting, but I almost feel like we needed more information on the world itself because it would have clarified some things.
The story also leaves you with quite a bit of loose ends. For one, the clarity of whether people are dead or not. For another, where the heck we were taken to at the very end of the book in the epilogue, and who the heck were we following in that chapter? For the final thing, we never get any sort of closure on who the heck was "haunting" Harrow and who that spoopy person ended up being, "The Sleeper". No clue on that. Also, we never really get to know any more about Camilla and those people who are still alive and what is going on with them. Some of this stuff, I get, we'll learn more in the next book, but how the heck are we going to learn more in the next book if all the main characters are freaking dead??? So it's almost like we need Harrow or Gideon to survive in order for things to make sense. Or, if they don't survive and it's just all new characters, I'm going to be upset. This sequel is taking the series almost in a direction I don't want it to go. So we'll see with this next book. Hopefully it will be better than this one.
All in all, this was an alright book, just not nearly as good as the first one. Gideon rules and Harrow is just confusing.