A review by lolajh
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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
Expand filter menu Content Warnings