Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy, 2) (urspr publ 2020; utgåvan 2020)

DNF.
2nd person, ugh. Lack of coherent plot, ugh. I liked Gideon but found this one too frustrating to finish. ( )

I spent about 3/4 of this book waiting for it to get good, which is a problem worth 1 and 1/2 stars in my mind. The end is confusing, but in a way that makes me want to pick up the next book, so I'm okay with that. Not quite as good as the first book, but I'm still glad I picked it up. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2021/01/2021004-harrow-ninth-tamsyn-muir.html ( )

If the first book in this trilogy was something of a hot mess, but fascinating and over the top for all that, the second book is even more of a mess, as, for much of the story, everyone's favorite teenage necromancer is in a world of mental disassociation as a result of the events of the first book. Whatever else this book slams home it's just how young our main character is, and how callow. The other thing this book slams home is all the bad faith and moral cut corners that this empire is built upon, crimes that have blow back from the cosmic level to the personal, and those choices are really going to detonate in the last third of this book. While I do feel that the first book is the better reading experience, I am left with a damn, WTF, kind of feeling, and the knowledge that the third book isn't coming out until 2022 does leave me frustrated.

As an aside, in the afterword, Muir gives a shout out to all the medical caseworkers who fed her anti-psychotic drugs, whether she wanted them or not. Muir apparently has hard experience with mental illness that she has filtered into this novel. ( )

I half liked Gideon the Ninth. The style was amazing, the world was intriguing, but so much of the worldbuilding wasn't fleshed out. Plus I couldn't forgive it for how it ended.

Well, the sequel kept up the virtues of the first while retroactively fixing its flaws. It was a trip, trippier and MORE confusing than the first, but a lot of the mysteries in the first book did get explained.

I would recommend reading with book 1 handy and sticky notes to put in the weird parts to flip back to. Every time something makes absolutely no sense, it *will* be explained.

Also tolerance for the occasional that's what she said joke helps. ( )