skygiants | (no subject)

It took me ages to actually get around to reading Nona the Ninth because I was grimly determined to reread Harrow the Ninth first, a book I respected but did not particularly enjoy on my first read.

On my second read I had more patience for HtN -- as I suspected, knowing what's going on and being able to go slow and look out for the interesting clues the narrative is laying with an eye to what they actually signify made for a better reading experience than zooming through the book with ferocious impatience while dodging piles of glistening viscera -- but it is still and I think will always be a book that is more interesting than enjoyable for me.

Nona the Ninth, on the other hand, I both respected and enjoyed enormously! tbh I think one of Muir's greatest talents as a storyteller is her refusal to let any person or group of people become stock characters -- obviously much of the interest of the narrative comes from the truly wild worldbuilding and the puzzlebox nature of the way that it's revealed but an equal amount of it derives naturally from layering a huge cast all of whom do genuinely have distinct goals and viewpoints over and over and over each other before steamrolling them flat with plot to create an enormous and delicious Goth croissant. The best part of Harrow for me was the way it returned to characters from the first book who had little chance to express a viewpoint and gave them more and different opportunities to make unexpected choices. The best part of Nona, for me, is the fact that it is set in a society of refugees who hate necromancers, and the people we are spending some of the most time with are refugee kids who are not at all important in the grand scheme of the plot and have nothing to do with the epic scope of the narrative but are important to our viewpoint character and so they are important to the narrative regardless.

Obviously I also liked seeing the returning characters again and getting a strictly limited third person's eye view on characters who are now familiar enough to me that I can put together implications from things the viewpoint character observes but does not understand is a very enjoyable way for me to read, especially now that I trust Muir enough to believe that every character is going to have interesting layers to their story sooner or later .... I guess technically 'getting a strictly limited third person's eye view about things the viewpoint character observes but does not understand' was also true of Harrow but it frustrated me there and delighted me here, no shade to Harrow.

And of course Cam and Pal have been some of my favorites since book 1 and tragic desperately loyal body-sharing is for me an absolute catnip trope, and I'm more intrigued by Coronabeth and Judith after this book than I ever have been previously, and the combo of backstory details dropped about the past Lyctors in the last two books has now built up enough detail to make for an interesting puzzlebox rather than a frustrating one.

So, overall, three books in ... I am engaged! I am invested! I'm on board!! It's probably also relevant that this is the least meme-y book yet and I do want to thank Tamsyn Muir for that ... I do not wish to deny her joy but I did need it. Just a little break. A breather. An opportunity to relax into a chapter without bracing to be absolutely bodyslammed by Essence of Tumblr 2014.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

hebethen

Y'know, I thought the front cover blurb was gonna be a cosmic-horror gotcha, but it turns out it was exactly true and correct and infinitely worse than a cosmic-horror gotcha.

From:

raven

So listen, I'm not reading the details closely just in case, will I like these books? firstly i was like, memes, no thank you, but now it seems to becoming something else other than that, but also you know there is a certain of goth silliness that doesn't exactly scream me. Plz opine, if you would?

From:

musesfool

I still think Muir has some pacing issues, but I enjoyed Nona a lot. NOODLE!

From:

likeadeuce

I loved it so much!

From:

aria

I cannot BELIEVE how much I loved Nona (the book, though also the character) -- I zoomed straight from "this is an interesting queer gothic puzzlebox in space but the only way I will EVER forgive none Houses with left grief is if Jod is literally a tumblrina" to "ohhhh I see what you're doing thematically, I see the shape of this overall story, I am still absolutely blown away by your twenty different character types and how 90% of them get me right in the gut, your puzzlebox is AMAZING, and given the Book of John chapters I frankly even forgive your wild referential meme-y worldbuilding." (Also not for nothing but the memes I caught in Nona -- far less than in the others, yaaay -- were the ones I've enjoyed the most.)

From:

skygiants

yes :(((( didn't gotcha me but did get me SAD!

From:

luckydicekirby

nona is so fun! cam and pal did not really do that much for me in the first book so them suddenly having incredibly compelling bodysharing angst really hit me with a sledgehammer and i'm still not over it. i was not ready. i care them so much.

From:

skygiants

hmmm this is a tricky one! there are such a lot of factors for and against that I find it really difficult to come down on whether to rec to you or not so instead I will provide you with some relevant facts:

1. thematically it is becoming increasingly clear that the series is thematically concerned with grief, trauma, entropy, and the relationship between humans and the worlds they live on in ways that I think will be really interesting to you if you can get there, whether or not you agree with its takes
2. book two in particular is very profoundly a book about grief and a well-done book about grief and the various weird tricks the mind plays in coping with it, and I think may well work much better for you than it did for me in much the same way the "Hard Times" episode of DS9 works better for you than for me. NB: I just reread the synopsis for "Hard Times" to check whether I felt confident in that comparison and I do in fact feel even more confident in it now than I did before I read the synopsis
3. all that said .... the memes remain. but it will probably be quite easy to tell within the first couple chapters whether you will bounce off the prose of the first book so hard that you will simply want to throw it across a room too many times per chapter to get anywhere ... so I think I'm coming down on you might as well give it a shot and see if it's impassable?

From:

skygiants

LOVED NOODLE

From:

skygiants

Yeah, it really worked for me best of any of them so far!

From:

skygiants

YEAH I truly did not expect this to be the one that got me but it sure did!! like I still have MANY worldbuilding questions but the themes and characters have coalesced so powerfully and compellingly into place for me at this point that plausibility no longer concerns me. I am here now, rotating the characters in my mind & ready to preorder Alecto --

From:

skygiants

I did like them already from the first book and I still was not in any way prepared ... really fully ambushed at the weakest point there!

From:

troisoiseaux

AYYYYYYYYYYYY. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I'm more intrigued by Coronabeth and Judith after this book than I ever have been previously

Have you read Muir's short story As Yet Unsent?

From:

sandrylene

An opportunity to relax into a chapter without bracing to be absolutely bodyslammed by Essence of Tumblr 2014.
*is dead*

It's so true. I think I have had more patience for this than many other people because of the extreme limitedness of my tumblring meaning I didn't start out overexposed.

I do want to reread the whole series with the reveals under my belt, because it's so clear each time I get to the end of each book how much in retrospect I was missing in that book and the prior ones, but given I'm probably just going to feel that *again* after the fourth, I think I may wait and do them all in one go post facto.

From:

landingtree

tbh I think one of Muir's greatest talents as a storyteller is her refusal to let any person or group of people become stock characters

Yes this! Everyone is always being people. I think when I reread Gideon I had a slightly let down sense of 'Oh, each member of this large cast will get one scene, and have one Thing what is going on with them, but that's all, this worked better when it was all a surprise to me.' But now, having reread Harrow and read Nona, I am fully confident that Muir could have written a whole novel from the perspective of any of them.

From:

raven

Thank you, this is very helpful! I think I'll give it a try and report back.

From:

skygiants

Yes!! But I hadn't heard about it I think until you linked it in your post so I am very glad you did, it immediately made Judith much more of a person to me also.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I was glad I reread Harrow beforehand but I think in retrospect the way to do it might have been to read Nona and then reread Harrow with extra appreciation for the things that are being set up in the next one so I may well end up following suit when Alecto comes out ....

Your limited tumblr experience makes you so powerful!!!

From:

skygiants

YEAH -- the way the narrative keeps circling back and returning to the stuff that happened in Gideon makes it feel like a better book in retrospect, tbh. I finished it the first time and I was like "this was fun but I feel like there are plot/motivation holes that were there for narrative convenience" and now ... I trust .... that they will be explained?! WILD feeling tbh!

From:

skygiants

I will look forward to hearing what you think, either way!

From:

scribe

Same hat on MUCH of this, including struggling with Harrow- zooming through the book with ferocious impatience while dodging piles of glistening viscera, GREAT description- and loving the setting of Nona, and of course the absolute catnip of Cam and Pal, SO GOOD.