Nona the Ninth
Sep. 19th, 2022 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraNona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir, 2022. Picked this up Saturday morning from the library and basically did nothing else until I finished it Saturday night, and everything else goes behind the cut. (Uh, except these handy links to where I talked about Harrow and Gideon. And also the statement that without the previous books in hand I had to do a certain amount of referring to a Locked Tomb wiki to look up character names and where exactly we saw people last, and I would continue to call these more like "books you might want to reread before each installment" than "books you can definitely just pick up and you'll be fine".)
So! Okay! The first thing I should say is how much I am enjoying being In A Series where a new book is a big event. It is just so much fun! I'm not sure there's *anything* I anticipate right now as much as I anticipate these books - I have largely fallen out of most media fandoms I was ever in to any extent, and now it's just like, oh, are they warring some kind of star again? the Em may be Ceeing U, but it won't be seeing me? I guess I've heard we're getting more Owl House, that's exciting. Ok, Novik's third Scholomance book, which, wait, holy shit, we're apparently getting in a WEEK??? (I missed the announcement on that! Is there any chance I'm going to be able to wait for a library copy, or am I going to buy the ebook in a frenzy of instant gratification. I'm apparently 156 for the BPL ebook and something like 121 for paper at Minuteman, although who knows how many copies.)
Anyways! Nona! This is kind of an odd followup in being so much more structurally straightforward than the last one - like it is still structured around the mystery of who is the protagonist exactly and where have we left whatever parts of any main characters who aren't the protagonist, but that question is clearly framed from the very beginning. And I didn't read the mystery as particularly *meaningful*, not in the way that Harrow's is a whole Thing about grief. I guess there are also the flashbacks but they were totally the God villain monologue I said we needed to get the insight on the Resurrection that only he had, and they also seemed fairly straightforward (although what's up with the chapter titles, other than sounding all biblical? I feel too lazy to decode them but I hope someone else does. while I'm being lazy I liked the gimmick with the names and Nona's auto-translating and I hope someone else puts forth some fun theories about back-"translations" for the various kids.)
Re the Resurrection, is the concept here "what if there was Jesus but he sucked"? I'm less interested in this than Muir seems to be. Also my bigger problem with the backstory is something that I find really frustrating in general, the conflation of "the Earth becoming inhabitable for humans" with "the Earth dying". Like, I don't know, I guess we don't know what was up with "we just wanted to save you, you were so sick" - maybe it was something genuinely planet-threatening, some kind of grey goo scenario or a loose micro black hole, but, I don't know, there's no evidence for that, the suggested "miracles" are "stabilising the North America glacier" and "trapping atmosphere over the Northern Territories", and they suggest that if they can "get the population safely out they can stay behind and try to clear the planet". I don't think of "the Earth" as something that cares at all what kind of lifeforms are happening on it! Even if the Earth likes life, why would it care more about humans than the beetles or jellyfish or slime molds or whoever's going to be happiest about the new conditions. The new fungal empire, I don't know. The idea that the Earth is "so scared" and "so mad" about, like, atmospheric conditions - basically a hairstyle - just did not work for me at all, and unfortunately it seems to be an important character beat in setting up the whole backstory and leading into what Alecto might do in the Alecto book. [ETA: and "the Earth" is specifically identified with the whole planet not just the biosphere, see "the rock who became meat" and the whole running thing about Nona wanting to eat "inorganic" things rather than food.]
Things I did like: Camilla and Palamedes, Nona being able to understand the Resurrection Beast speaking through Judith, Gideon and Ianthe showing up as the Princes. (Or... part of Gideon. Or whatever.)
Things that felt like new unexplained elements that we didn't need: the Angel who is the Messenger and part of the Message, what?
I am not convinced this needed to be spun out into its own book but I enjoyed reading it and if Muir felt she needed the space to really land the endgame, why not. She gets to sell more books, we get to read more books, and she has not yet passed that "ugh why isn't someone *editing her* line, for me at least.
So! Okay! The first thing I should say is how much I am enjoying being In A Series where a new book is a big event. It is just so much fun! I'm not sure there's *anything* I anticipate right now as much as I anticipate these books - I have largely fallen out of most media fandoms I was ever in to any extent, and now it's just like, oh, are they warring some kind of star again? the Em may be Ceeing U, but it won't be seeing me? I guess I've heard we're getting more Owl House, that's exciting. Ok, Novik's third Scholomance book, which, wait, holy shit, we're apparently getting in a WEEK??? (I missed the announcement on that! Is there any chance I'm going to be able to wait for a library copy, or am I going to buy the ebook in a frenzy of instant gratification. I'm apparently 156 for the BPL ebook and something like 121 for paper at Minuteman, although who knows how many copies.)
Anyways! Nona! This is kind of an odd followup in being so much more structurally straightforward than the last one - like it is still structured around the mystery of who is the protagonist exactly and where have we left whatever parts of any main characters who aren't the protagonist, but that question is clearly framed from the very beginning. And I didn't read the mystery as particularly *meaningful*, not in the way that Harrow's is a whole Thing about grief. I guess there are also the flashbacks but they were totally the God villain monologue I said we needed to get the insight on the Resurrection that only he had, and they also seemed fairly straightforward (although what's up with the chapter titles, other than sounding all biblical? I feel too lazy to decode them but I hope someone else does. while I'm being lazy I liked the gimmick with the names and Nona's auto-translating and I hope someone else puts forth some fun theories about back-"translations" for the various kids.)
Re the Resurrection, is the concept here "what if there was Jesus but he sucked"? I'm less interested in this than Muir seems to be. Also my bigger problem with the backstory is something that I find really frustrating in general, the conflation of "the Earth becoming inhabitable for humans" with "the Earth dying". Like, I don't know, I guess we don't know what was up with "we just wanted to save you, you were so sick" - maybe it was something genuinely planet-threatening, some kind of grey goo scenario or a loose micro black hole, but, I don't know, there's no evidence for that, the suggested "miracles" are "stabilising the North America glacier" and "trapping atmosphere over the Northern Territories", and they suggest that if they can "get the population safely out they can stay behind and try to clear the planet". I don't think of "the Earth" as something that cares at all what kind of lifeforms are happening on it! Even if the Earth likes life, why would it care more about humans than the beetles or jellyfish or slime molds or whoever's going to be happiest about the new conditions. The new fungal empire, I don't know. The idea that the Earth is "so scared" and "so mad" about, like, atmospheric conditions - basically a hairstyle - just did not work for me at all, and unfortunately it seems to be an important character beat in setting up the whole backstory and leading into what Alecto might do in the Alecto book. [ETA: and "the Earth" is specifically identified with the whole planet not just the biosphere, see "the rock who became meat" and the whole running thing about Nona wanting to eat "inorganic" things rather than food.]
Things I did like: Camilla and Palamedes, Nona being able to understand the Resurrection Beast speaking through Judith, Gideon and Ianthe showing up as the Princes. (Or... part of Gideon. Or whatever.)
Things that felt like new unexplained elements that we didn't need: the Angel who is the Messenger and part of the Message, what?
I am not convinced this needed to be spun out into its own book but I enjoyed reading it and if Muir felt she needed the space to really land the endgame, why not. She gets to sell more books, we get to read more books, and she has not yet passed that "ugh why isn't someone *editing her* line, for me at least.
