The friendliest necromancer in all of space.
Each of the novels in Tasmyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series has maintained the same structure. The story follows the point of view of a baffled protagonist, who like the audience, is not quite sure what is happening. They’re just as lost as the reader when big proper nouns are thrown around. Then, after reading three quarters of the book, grabbing on to every bit of narrative lore like its wreckage from a ship, trying to stay afloat, it all (mostly) comes together. Both the reader and the protagonist have enough puzzle pieces to finally understand what occurred in the previous 300 pages, and take action towards a thrilling resolution.
With each book having a different protagonist, you would think this path old. Muir does such a wonderful job at writing a uniquely perplexed protagonist in Gideon, Harrow, and Nona. It seems like an incredibly difficult trick to have three whole books, each with a different main character, each not really having a clue about the goings on, and then for understanding to flow right along with the reader in a natural way. It’s fun to theorize and guess. The mysterious nature of the books draw you in. You get to the end of the book, and you contemplate re-reading the entire thing with your current knowledge to see what you’re uninitiated eyes missed. Heck, you contemplate reading the book before it for the same reason.
Nona the Ninth was good. I loved Nona. I loved the family she is surrounded by. I loved her friends. It was a friendlier, childlike point of view in a very anxious setting. So far I’ve enjoyed the second and third books much more than the first. I look forward to the final book in the series. If you made it to Harrow the Ninth, why not keep going?