Harrow the Ninth
Oct. 8th, 2020 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraHarrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I was a little overwhelmed when this popped from a looong library queue three days before Return of the Thief day, especially when I realized I was also going to want to reread Gideon (and hadn't finished my Queen's Thief reread either), but, hey, housework schmousework. Rereading Gideon was a good choice (rereading the Queen's Thief series was also a good choice) and I recommend it for people reading this one, unless of course you are a lot better with names and details than I am. I liked this book and continue to recommend the series to people who liked the first one, although I will say that this is a very different book. If Gideon was Hunger Games meets The Westing Game (like I have said), let's call this one the Inheritance Trilogy plus Inception.
Everything else behind the spoiler cut, major spoilers:
I was pleasantly surprised by how much reveal we got! I admit I did not entirely trust Muir to not be stingy in book two, holding out most answers for book three, but we got a very nice chunk of backstory, and we get to go into book three with a largely different set of major questions than we started with. (About which more in a sec.)
I really, really liked the "AU retelling" of book one as a negative-space demonstration of Harrow's grief. I was having all these thoughts about how fanfictional it was, one of the most fanfic-genre moves I'd ever seen someone pull in profic, and then Muir really started going for it with the reverse AU and the arranged marriage AU (with Her Divine Highness, *before* that reveal! oh my god, Muir!) and when we got to the barista AU I lost it completely and just about fell over laughing. "Absolutely not." Ahahahahah.
I also cried. Over Ortus, of all people, who I certainly did not see coming back to be developed into an actual character. But the scene when Ortus was like "I was a grown man, and I should have done something", wah. And I liked that he was able to summon Matthias Nonius by the power of belief and art, even bad art. That was satisfyingly epic.
Other favorite parts: the soup, obviously. Hahaha.
So, back to questions. I don't entirely get *why* John/God didn't want anyone else to become a perfect Lyctor - it sounded like maybe Augustine had killed Alfred in a rush, in some kind of emergency, and maybe John perpetrated the whole lie rather than tell him he'd had another choice? Presumably Pyrrha was around for it and will provide one more good chunk of backstory exposition at some point. And God is going to need some kind of villain monologue, too, because a lot of the other remaining questions are things like "what exactly *was* the Resurrection" that only he knows. Well, I guess the BOE might know too (and that's why he's been trying to exterminate them, if that's in fact his mission?). I'm not sure at this point if we're looking at more of a Lathe of Heaven-style "there was an apocalypse and John, the sole survivor, magically recreated our new world" or the even darker "John actually created the apocalypse so that he could play God-Emperor". And the River is so fucked up because John fucked it up, and the climax is going to be an Other Wind thing where they have to dismantle necromancy to unfuck the afterlife, maybe? Although I think Muir likes this world too much to want to do a "magic has to leave" ending (although it wouldn't at all surprise me if at the minimum it had to leave *Harrow*, whose HEA is to stop being special and get to have some kind of ordinary young adulthood after her extremely fucked up childhood, presumably by being stripped of the 200 dead baby souls...). Or I could be off about all of this, it took me forever to catch on that the people in the AU were actually real ghosts and not just altered memories. Anyways, I find this a very pleasing state of information vs questions, I like having stuff to get to speculate about.
(Oh, and while I'm speculating, I totally think we're getting a Gideon/Harrow ending at this point, although maybe the kind of ending where they're like "we must go our separate ways and grow up a little and learn to be independent but it's clear that we intend to get back together in the future", which should keep the fandom happily busy writing takes on that.)
Everything else behind the spoiler cut, major spoilers:
I was pleasantly surprised by how much reveal we got! I admit I did not entirely trust Muir to not be stingy in book two, holding out most answers for book three, but we got a very nice chunk of backstory, and we get to go into book three with a largely different set of major questions than we started with. (About which more in a sec.)
I really, really liked the "AU retelling" of book one as a negative-space demonstration of Harrow's grief. I was having all these thoughts about how fanfictional it was, one of the most fanfic-genre moves I'd ever seen someone pull in profic, and then Muir really started going for it with the reverse AU and the arranged marriage AU (with Her Divine Highness, *before* that reveal! oh my god, Muir!) and when we got to the barista AU I lost it completely and just about fell over laughing. "Absolutely not." Ahahahahah.
I also cried. Over Ortus, of all people, who I certainly did not see coming back to be developed into an actual character. But the scene when Ortus was like "I was a grown man, and I should have done something", wah. And I liked that he was able to summon Matthias Nonius by the power of belief and art, even bad art. That was satisfyingly epic.
Other favorite parts: the soup, obviously. Hahaha.
So, back to questions. I don't entirely get *why* John/God didn't want anyone else to become a perfect Lyctor - it sounded like maybe Augustine had killed Alfred in a rush, in some kind of emergency, and maybe John perpetrated the whole lie rather than tell him he'd had another choice? Presumably Pyrrha was around for it and will provide one more good chunk of backstory exposition at some point. And God is going to need some kind of villain monologue, too, because a lot of the other remaining questions are things like "what exactly *was* the Resurrection" that only he knows. Well, I guess the BOE might know too (and that's why he's been trying to exterminate them, if that's in fact his mission?). I'm not sure at this point if we're looking at more of a Lathe of Heaven-style "there was an apocalypse and John, the sole survivor, magically recreated our new world" or the even darker "John actually created the apocalypse so that he could play God-Emperor". And the River is so fucked up because John fucked it up, and the climax is going to be an Other Wind thing where they have to dismantle necromancy to unfuck the afterlife, maybe? Although I think Muir likes this world too much to want to do a "magic has to leave" ending (although it wouldn't at all surprise me if at the minimum it had to leave *Harrow*, whose HEA is to stop being special and get to have some kind of ordinary young adulthood after her extremely fucked up childhood, presumably by being stripped of the 200 dead baby souls...). Or I could be off about all of this, it took me forever to catch on that the people in the AU were actually real ghosts and not just altered memories. Anyways, I find this a very pleasing state of information vs questions, I like having stuff to get to speculate about.
(Oh, and while I'm speculating, I totally think we're getting a Gideon/Harrow ending at this point, although maybe the kind of ending where they're like "we must go our separate ways and grow up a little and learn to be independent but it's clear that we intend to get back together in the future", which should keep the fandom happily busy writing takes on that.)
