Alina

What a trippy book. Sci-fi can be difficult for me to follow, and Muir approaches the world through Gideon's understanding, which means things aren't always explained. This took some getting used to, but ultimately served the narrative and made the world feel real and lived-in. Unraveling the mysteries of Lyctorhood was fascinating and horrifying. The sharp turn the book takes into horror at a certain point was bone-chilling (lol) and felt earned. A fantastic start to the series and a compelling story I know I'll be returning to over and over again. "We do bones," indeed.

Harrow the Ninth trades one annoying lesbian narrator (complimentary) for another, equally but differently annoying lesbian narrator (also complimentary). It trades the mysteries of Canaan House for the mysteries of Lyctorhood and God Himself. It answers exactly none of the questions set forth in the first book and instead opens up a whole new world of what the fuck. It introduces a new cast of characters with absolutely no plot armor and strange unknowable motivations for doing the things they do. It is trippy and wonderful and weird and made me go "WHAT" at least a dozen times.

I read this in tandem with a friend and we had the best time sharing theories and reactions to the absolutely wild series of events that transpires in these pages. Also, the MEMES. Tamsyn Muir is a mad genius. After the first book took me about a month to get through (mostly due to the first few chapters), I absolutely blitzed through this one in a matter of days. We're really cooking at this point in the series, and even though you know you won't be given any answers, you just have to hold on tight and enjoy the ride. It's a fuckin wild one.

Well, I wasn't expecting this book to be a Cam/Pal love story, but wow is it beautiful. I absolutely sobbed during the Birth of Paul and most of the rest of their scenes towards the end. They're the picture of what Lyctorhood should have been from the start.

Nona was a bit trickier to follow, given Nona's general lack of understanding of...anything, but her narrative voice is delightful and full of childlike wonder. The way she describes certain things made me appreciate the little things in new ways. There are some Big Events happening behind the scenes, but Nona is blissfully unaware of most of them, even when she's witnessing them with her own eyes, and so the reader has to really read between the lines to follow the overarching conflict as it builds to the end. It's interesting from our perspective to see certain characters that we think we know portrayed in a completely new light. It's not clear how much time has passed since the end of Harrow the Ninth, but things have progressed in unexpected and yet completely expected ways. I'm really looking forward to the final (hopefully) installment in this series and finally getting some John-damned answers.

I really enjoyed this book. As the first installment of a series, you expect to have a fairly open-ended narrative that could reasonably continue, but I felt Ithaca did a nice job wrapping up the immediate story satisfactorily. The narrator being Hera was an unexpected but nice touch, allowing us to get a truly omnipotent view of the action with some snarky observations thrown in for good measure. Despite (or perhaps because of) her Goddess nature, Hera is an unreliable narrator, prone to favoritism and grudges, and this adds some interesting color to her interactions with the minor cast, especially Athena and Clytemnestra.

Penelope is a smart woman and a capable leader, but as a main character I felt I didn't get a great picture of her. Hopefully she comes into focus more in subsequent books.