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

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. ( )

Okay so: I'm glad I waited a little bit to read this so I could talk about it with people who had already read it. Without that, I really might have just gotten mad and carried that with me throughout the book. It really doesn't give any ground in letting you understand for the good part of the beginning, and does so intentionally and frankly by the end I'm also not sure I know what's going on, but in a better way I think? That makes me excited for the third book, rather than just going "I don't get what is happening." There are still things that make me wince; I have no idea how you approach this book if you were not on tumblr in 2012, and maybe if I wasn't there the immense number of now extremely old memes would not make me yell "oh come ON" every time, but woof.

BUT, my little complaints aside, I did enjoy this I think even more than I did Gideon the Ninth; I loved all the mentor characters (Mercymorn for president because she mirrors exactly how I feel when I see most undergrads now,) and I loved seeing how these immortals are just broken people who really have no place to try to mentor anyone. Again, I found a lot of it confusing, but I think it was still okay, and I am definitely excited to get my hands on the next book when it comes out! ( )

I have a lot of complicated feelings. ( )

tldr: I liked it and am looking forward to the next one.

Oh look at me reading a WHOLE BOOK vry quickly. I am trying. This one helped my aversion to reading by being a book that I really wanted to read. It also challenged me because its structure is so deeply weird and I have an eensy amount of brain space for reading anything right now, particularly stuff that is remotely unusual. I am challenged sufficiently with just, like, living at the moment. The weirdness works, and it is a good book, and also I only made it through the first half because I really am trying to force myself to read stuff. The second half was easier for me. If you aren't struggling with books, you might not have a problem with the first half at all.

The gross body gunk stuff is EXTRA a lot in this installment, so maybe know that going in. That has nothing to do with the rest of this review, but feels like a good FYI. There's gross killer space bugs (this is not a spoiler. You find out about them on maybe the second page) as well as the various necromantic exploding body shenanigans and it gets gory in new and visceral ways.

Unrelated to that, there are three things that I don't do a great job with while I read:
1) Numbers. Dates, ages, temperatures, counting, whatever; I almost never retain any of them while reading something the first time. I just re-read Gideon the Ninth and discovered that the two main characters are 17 and 18. I did not pick that up the first time I read it, even though it SAYS it right there on the page because that is just... a thing I always manage to overlook or forget immediately. I did at least manage to remember the Fourth were teenagers, though I did not remember their actual ages either.
2) Names. This goes extra for a name that I'm not sure how to pronounce, but still applies to names I can pronounce perfectly well where my brain will fill in a word shaped blob instead of the actual name. Like. I see the shape and texture of the word and that's what my brain pops in while reading instead of the actual name. Sometimes, if I am trying to consciously work on this, I can slowly reread a name over and over and make it stick. Lots of times I don't and then discover after reading a book that I remember no one's names at all. I was 3/4 of the way through this when I figured out her name is HarrowhaRk not HarrowhaWk. Like, I read a book and most of another book and thought her name wrong all that time because ???
3) Maps and/or any sort of spatial description. I hate them and cannot understand them in any way that makes useful sense. I avoid book maps at all costs. As a person who enjoys epic fantasy, I recognize this is probably a failing but also I cannot make maps make sense so I've stopped trying. This wasn't really important to this book, but it is A Problem I Have.

This is why I like to reread things I enjoy: I'm terrible at details the first time through. I feel like this is a series where reading the books more than once would be useful for anyone though. There's a lot going on, a bunch of it is cryptic, and there's mysteries wrapped around mysteries. It's very satisfying to watch the way Muir threads everything back together, though I am still not totally sure I know what's going on. I was very entertained. I am extremely excited for the next story ( )