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A review by daturas
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
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? It's complicated
5.0
This is a book about love.
The whole series tackles love. If you're here, you already know that. Gideon keeps it in its heart's basement, Harrow is a fucked up love letter. Nona looks you in your soul and says "love is the reason" in the simplest, most pure way imaginable. Love is everywhere and it drives everything. Sometimes it leads people home. Sometimes it drives people to make bad decisions, or at least morally questionable ones. Did you know that cows have complex social rituals? Now you do. Did you know that "like" is just "love" that hasn't been invited inside? Now you do. I could go on and on. I still may. It's one in the morning.
I have read this book three times since it came out and I don't think I'll stop reading it. I truly think it's my favorite in the series.
Nona was necessary because she loves you and everyone around her so strongly and fully that it forces you to look at the main theme of the series head on. Her narrative is necessary because it introduces & illustrates the affect the Cohort & John's reign has on everyday people from an unbiased narrator (instead of one who has grown up indoctrinated into it, like Gideon & Harrow).
Nona is a normal girl, except she's not at all. She's six months old and eighteen years old and billions of years old all at once. She's a young girl with a comic friend group who love to poke fun. She's got the one teacher she's become emotionally attached to (that every queer & neurodivergent kid will understand). She loves dogs. She dances in the kitchen with Pyhrra. She loves Cam & Pal. Gideon and Harrow were both great narrators, don't get me wrong. But they were distant--they were both very obviously scifi characters living in a scifi world. Nona brings the reader back down to Earth. She's relatable in a way Gideon and Harrow aren't, and thus she brings another element to the series we didn't know we needed until we had it: familiarity. Nona feels like home. And that's the genius of it, because she literally is home.The reveal throughout the Jod chapters & the end of the book that Nona is Alecto, in Harrow's body, without either character's memory. Oh my god. How beautiful. How stunning to establish this character that says "i love everything and everyone with my whole heart and chest", who cannot read but somehow knows every language, who can look at any living being and tell exactly what they are thinking without hesitation, who points at everyone including herself and thinks "she is beautiful", and say "this is Earth. this is your home. mother earth is a teenage girl." my green thing. my green and sprawling thing. what have they done to you? and, on top of that--the implications that alecto (and by extention nona, who is the same being just with a different memory) is a res. beast....wow. wow. wow. how stunning. how beautiful. how horrifying.)
Many people have been calling this book a filler. I see why--on the surface it does read differently to the other books. There's not as much action and certainly not as much necromancy. But it has its purpose, just like the other two. I encourage everyone to read these books at least two times when I rec them out. Nona the Ninth is no different. The beauty of TazMuir's Locked Tomb is that there's always more than what's on the surface.
Don't even get me started on the other characters. It's literally one in the morning.
Nona loves you. I love Nona. We're all at her birthday party right now. How crazy is that? I'm blowing one of those party popper things. You're throwing confetti. She's blowing out candles.
[if you would like to hear more of my thoughts, feel free to reach out @ amonotropauniflora.tumblr.com!]
The whole series tackles love. If you're here, you already know that. Gideon keeps it in its heart's basement, Harrow is a fucked up love letter. Nona looks you in your soul and says "love is the reason" in the simplest, most pure way imaginable. Love is everywhere and it drives everything. Sometimes it leads people home. Sometimes it drives people to make bad decisions, or at least morally questionable ones. Did you know that cows have complex social rituals? Now you do. Did you know that "like" is just "love" that hasn't been invited inside? Now you do. I could go on and on. I still may. It's one in the morning.
I have read this book three times since it came out and I don't think I'll stop reading it. I truly think it's my favorite in the series.
Nona was necessary because she loves you and everyone around her so strongly and fully that it forces you to look at the main theme of the series head on. Her narrative is necessary because it introduces & illustrates the affect the Cohort & John's reign has on everyday people from an unbiased narrator (instead of one who has grown up indoctrinated into it, like Gideon & Harrow).
Nona is a normal girl, except she's not at all. She's six months old and eighteen years old and billions of years old all at once. She's a young girl with a comic friend group who love to poke fun. She's got the one teacher she's become emotionally attached to (that every queer & neurodivergent kid will understand). She loves dogs. She dances in the kitchen with Pyhrra. She loves Cam & Pal. Gideon and Harrow were both great narrators, don't get me wrong. But they were distant--they were both very obviously scifi characters living in a scifi world. Nona brings the reader back down to Earth. She's relatable in a way Gideon and Harrow aren't, and thus she brings another element to the series we didn't know we needed until we had it: familiarity. Nona feels like home. And that's the genius of it, because she literally is home.
Many people have been calling this book a filler. I see why--on the surface it does read differently to the other books. There's not as much action and certainly not as much necromancy. But it has its purpose, just like the other two. I encourage everyone to read these books at least two times when I rec them out. Nona the Ninth is no different. The beauty of TazMuir's Locked Tomb is that there's always more than what's on the surface.
Don't even get me started on the other characters. It's literally one in the morning.
Nona loves you. I love Nona. We're all at her birthday party right now. How crazy is that? I'm blowing one of those party popper things. You're throwing confetti. She's blowing out candles.
[if you would like to hear more of my thoughts, feel free to reach out @ amonotropauniflora.tumblr.com!]