Nona the Ninth

About Nona the Ninth

Nona the Ninth is the third entry in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series and, unexpectedly, the warmest book in a series known for its darkness. Where Gideon the Ninth was a murder mystery with emotional devastation at its core, and Harrow the Ninth was a deliberately fractured descent into grief and unreliable narration, Nona arrives with a companion, a cat, six friends, and a nine-days countdown to the end of the world. Nona herself is one of fantasy's most joyful protagonists: a woman inhabiting a body she does not understand, experiencing the ordinary world - food, dogs, children, a river, the smell of rain - as if everything is a wonder because for her it genuinely is. She has no memory, no defined past, and no certainty about what she is, but she has the people around her and her overwhelming capacity for affection, and she considers this sufficient. The effect is disarming. The book is set on a besieged planet, hiding among refugees from the Houses, with the Resurrection Beast closing in and the remnants of an insurgency trying to hold a city together. The political mechanics of the siege are rendered with the same dry wit that characterizes all of Muir's work, and the ensemble of side characters - Blood of Eden operatives, refugees, a teacher, children Nona cares for - is the most grounded cast the series has had. Underneath the warmth, Muir is assembling the pieces of a revelation that the series has been building toward since the beginning, and the final act of Nona the Ninth - when everything Nona has been approaches what Nona actually is - is devastating in the way that only earned reveals can be. The Locked Tomb series resists summary because part of its power is the experience of discovering what it is while reading it. Nona the Ninth is the entry point for readers who bounced off the earlier volumes' density, and the payoff for readers who made it through.

Tropes & Themes