A review by mgdoherty
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

This book has a lot to say about trauma; about the burdens older generations leave for the next generation to shoulder; about forgiveness, forgiving yourself for what you could not control and for your own ignorance, and forgiving others for their weakness. One of my favorite scenes involved an adult apologizing to a younger person for not having protected them from abuse and neglect. “I should’ve offered help. I was an adult, and you were a neglected child.” 

 

In a way this deconstructs a lot of YA tropes I’ve read in other series, much like Hunger Games also deconstructs the tropes that were common at the time. Terrible things happen to these protagonists in The Locked Tomb series, and they are allowed to act as traumatized as they feel in these books. In Gideon the Ninth, Gideon and Harrow were largely hiding their true selves inside the story-like roles they played – Gideon the tough dumb hero who was too tough to ever be hurt or feel trauma, and Harrow the evil war crime who was an abomination from birth who will take out her pain on the world because as “evil” as she is, she has to be worth the sacrifice her parents made to conceive her. (She never can be, but she still has to try; it’s a compulsion.) These roles allowed them to deal with the trauma of their lives in Ninth House. 

But in Harrow The Ninth, these fairytale roles have been stripped away. Harrow spent her entire life defining herself in opposition to Gideon, the child who survived her parents’ genocide. She doesn’t know who she is without Gideon; she might not exist at all, if she doesn’t have Gideon to define herself against. Without Gideon, she’s lost the biggest part of her identity, and she cannot live with it, she absolutely cannot live with this, but neither can she die, because she has to live and somehow become worthy of this sacrifice she never asked for. 

Due to trauma, Harrow has control issues. She can’t accept that Gideon died via suicide (in a roundabout way) and calls it murder because it’s easier to hate herself for killing Gideon than to hate Gideon for leaving her alone. One character says it best when they say: “What is better? An ignoble death by someone else’s hands or heroic death by one’s own? If the first -- that she was cut down by an enemy -- I would feel such hate for the enemy. If the second – an ugly death, at her own devising -- who then would be left for me to hate? The eternal problem.” 

 And so Harrow chooses to blame herself for Gideon’s death because it hurts too much to give up control, to admit that Gideon made a choice without her, a choice that left her stranded alone on the island of Lyctorhood. She can’t accept that Gideon died via suicide (in a roundabout way) and calls it murder because it’s easier to hate herself for killing Gideon than to hate Gideon for leaving her alone. 

There are a lot of mysteries floating around this book, seemingly moreso than GtN. We have The Body and The Sleeper, our most mysterious new players on the stage, and this all resolves at the end with answers for who these mysterious players are, but the journey up till then is a bit confusing. I took a lot of notes and had a lot of incorrect theories! Like GtN, I think this is a book I may appreciate more on reread, though I did enjoy it and admire the craft a lot. 

Also I’m just gonna drop a spoilery paragraph here to say

how incredible it is that The Sleeper (aka Commander Wake, aka Gideon’s mom) who seems to be deeply and determinedly human, not a hint of magic about her at all, and yet she is the deadliest person in the galaxy, dead or alive apparently. Her vengeance will be legend, when it comes to pass.

Pacing: This book is so slow. I love how it slowly revealed nuggets of information but the super-slow pacing + the nonlinearity made it a very hard story to digest. I think at least fifty pages could’ve been cut, and that’s a conversative estimate. 

It took me two years to feel emotionally ready to tackle this book, and I’m glad I waited. I think I needed time to digest the end of Book 1, and this, too, is a book that you may need time to digest. That said, I think it is well worth the effort you put in. Also, the humor and memes are incredible. 
 
 

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