Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth is probably the single most mindbending book that I've ever read. From start to finish I felt like I was being gaslit, and that Tamsyn Muir was laughing at me as I second guessed myself into a gibbering mess on the floor. Needless to say, I adored this book.

There's a few quirks straight off the bat that I had heard people complain about before I'd even finished Gideon, so I went in slightly apprehensive. Especially considering the second person perspective that is so incredibly divisive.

I'd like to say that these complaints are warranted, and that people have good reason to feel this way. And to a certain extent they do. If you just hate second person, and think it can never be done well, you'll hate this, but if I'm being honest, anyone who complained about the second person after finishing the book missed the point. The book fundamentally doesn't work without the existence of the second person.

The other main complaint I've seen is that people didn't like the fact that there was a retelling of the events in the first book, but this is an incredibly unfair assessment of those chapters if I'm being honest, and the complaint rings hollow to me after I've finished the book, since it comes across as though the people raising this complaint didn't finish the book.

The pacing complaint that I've seen is a totally valid one, though I personally liked the pacing, even if the book is very slow at points. That's just the style of story that I enjoy, so this one clicked with me.

The characters in this book are stellar, much like they were in Gideon, each one making a splash within a few pages of their introduction. This book is also benefitted by having a much smaller cast than the previous entry, allowing the other characters to absolutely shine off the page. Looking back at it, Gideon definitely suffered to a small extent from character bloat (despite my enjoyment of those characters) and definitely could have used a bit more time with some of them. This is mitigated in both this book and Nona, as now we've seen more of a lot of those characters, so Gideon is very much the prologue of the series that serves as setup.

The Emperor in particular is an absolute delight, acting like that fun uncle that you only used to see at family events, except you're seeing him in a really important position of power, and his chaotic inner gremlin is telling him to fuck around and have fun, but his sensible side (and sensible friends) are steering him narrowly past that path. This creates a lot of really engaging scenes with him, where the fun part is dropped, and he just gets sad, and you see the pain he's been through, paying off setup from early on in GtN.

Then there's Harrow. Harrow had big shoes to fill for me, coming off the back of Gideon, who is now firmly squared away as one of my favourite protagonists in literature. And you know what? She didn't fill them completely. But she was damn close. Harrow in any other series would be the best PoV that you'd get, but here she just has some damn good competition. The fact that Tamsyn was able to craft two distinctly phenomenal protagonists is something worthy of praise on it's own, so I'm not even remotely disappointed by Harrow not living up to the Himbo in chief. She's still an S-tier Protagonist in my opinion.

And then there's the prose. The prose is once again phenomenal in this book, Tamsyn going all out to show off her skills as an author. I was challenged multiple times throughout this book with words that I had never even realized needed defining, but here she is, pulling out the most obscure terms she can, and I love it.

All in all, a hearty recommendation from me, I adore this book. Tamsyn Muir is one of the best modern SFF authors in the game, and I'm so excited to finish the series.