Eric’s review of Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2) > Likes and Comments
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my guess [still early in the book myself] is that its gideon narrating harrows actions somehow.
I shouldn’t have to force myself through two thirds of a novel to get to the pay off/it to be worth it. Those first two thirds still need to be compelling or have something worth coming back to, more than “it will make sense later.” Just finished it, completely agree with you. It’s like she wanted to write a trilogy but was only able to come up with enough plot with this one by retreading the previous book and barely letting the plot go anywhere.
Aw, man. My copy's supposed to come in tomorrow.
Brian wrote: "Aw, man. My copy's supposed to come in tomorrow."
I totally understand why someone may not like this book, but I love it. Form your own opinions IMO.
T wrote:
I totally understand why someone may not like this book, but I love it. Form your own opinions IMO."
Indeed!
Yesssss thanks for articulating my thoughts. Nothing happens for the majority of the books and the whole time I was just thinking to myself "why.... Why any of this? It's useless". It was super duper frustrating not being given a single shred of info about the mystery and yes the writing did feel like fanfic.
I feel absolutely the same way (despite still holding trust in Tamsyn, everyone can have a bad book). Guideon was such a cool protagonist, with such a strong personality and a really particular tone. For most of the book we get a really plain narrator (which shouldn't be this plain if it wasn't meant to hold a reveal 12 hours into the book) and segments of a parallel past story that we KNOW are wrong, so there's no surprise when the reveal happens.
And the Harrow in this book is painfully boring, not at all like the previous Harrow we met in the first one. Even with what happened and why, she should have kept her snarky tone and her strong personality, rather than becoming a blank slate.
A lot of characters are brought back as pure fanservice. And considering the huge cast of Guideon the Ninth (over twenty characters), it's really difficult to remember who everyone is.
I wish the story would have taken a different direction from the start. I'm sad that such a brilliant book as the first gets a mediocre sequel as this one.
I would say the plot structure of this book is something like Pulp Fiction crossed with Vanilla Sky.
For me, that's very cool, but I can see what it would be frustrating. I think Harrow the Ninth is a significantly stronger book than Gideon the Ninth, primarily because it gives us more visibility into the universe. I feel like the world-building was extremely weak in Gideon the Ninth, although that might have been intentional by the author. I was left wishing I understood the world better. In Harrow the Ninth we learn a lot more about the rules of the setting.
Agreed on everything you said. Really had to fast forward and skip a lot of things I thought were unnecessary fillers in the beginning because it felt like it was just there to beef up the book and offer nothing to the story.
I did a review that's basically yours but less thought out.
The problem isn't necessarily what was done in the first two thirds, it's
that it lasted for two thirds of the book.
I also wanted the escape I didn't get.
I just finished Harrow and came to look for other people who were as angry and disappointed as I was. I honestly don't understand all the praise it's getting. It's awful. Tamsyn Muir did succeed in breaking my heart with this one, just not at all in the way I was hoping for.
My dudes, I think you missed some of the point of this book. We know Harrow is an unreliable narrator, she's insane. Respectfully, if you forgot exactly who died in book one it's on you to check that shit. Personally I will never forget because some of my favorite characters had their day under the sun mercilessly cut short. And then you have to consider that they are necromantic gods, so the dead runners up for said position, that's a important bit of info to cotton onto. There's also a very good reason why bits of this book would be narrated in second person, and if that wasn't burned into your brainpan due to pure shock at the end of Gideon the Ninth, I guess find a less mysterious fantasy wizard to gush over. Harry Dresden seems like the type.
Dani wrote: "My dudes, I think you missed some of the point of this book. We know Harrow is an unreliable narrator, she's insane. Respectfully, if you forgot exactly who died in book one it's on you to check th..."
Boring. Confusing. Frustrating. Nothing set up earlier in the book pays off in any meaningful way. 2/3 of the book is basically pointless to the plot. The reason for the book being written in second person IS CONTRADICTED WITHIN THE BOOK. I'm not shitting on it because I forgot the characters from the first book, or am forgetting that Harrow is insane. I'm shitting on it because it was a flat out bad plotting and storytelling, with a really annoying gimmick that doesn't even make sense within the context of the story. I'm shitting on being kept COMPLETELY in the dark without a single clue whatsoever to use to figure things out for myself for the overwhelming majority of the book. I'm shitting on looking back at that first 2/3 of the book now knowing what was going on, and it STILL not making sense. It was badly plotted. It doesn't make sense, even when you know what's happening. And it breaks its own continuity.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who felt this way. I read this review a few days ago it encouraged me to keep going, which I'm glad I did. But I had such a hard time with this book. It's one thing for a narrator to be unreliable, but they still have to be interesting. And I agree that the 3rd person narration doesn't make any sense. I will admit that I lost track of some of the characters (there were so many) and I also forgot what color everyone's eyes are supposed to be, so that's on on me.
Totally agree with this review. This book reminded me of how I felt when I watched the Star Wars prequels and realized that George Lucas completely misunderstood what made his own stories successful and popular, and dedicated himself entirely to another style with... questionable... results.
Agree wholeheartedly that Muir let the mystery linger far too long. By the time we learn what's going on, I'd gotten a bit bored of the mystery part.
Thank you!!! I’m about 7 hours into the audiobook and I have NO idea what the hell is going on. I absolutely loved Gideon the Ninth. This one is really frustrating me. Is there a good chapter to skip ahead to?
I completely agree with this review. It took me longer than it should have to finish the book. The first 70% was so boring. Then you get the last 30% that felt like the first book again. I think the first 70% should have been shrunk to like 20% (e-books make me think in percentages instead of pages now) and actually got into the real story.
I'm truly hoping the final book will be less boring. Maybe a more critical editor could have fixed this.
Shingetsu wrote: " (e-books make me think in percentages instead of pages now)"
Ayup.
Yuuuuuup 🥺 I was so sad about this book!!
Thank goodness it was not just me but I never finished it - sucks because I loved Gideon. This was just a hell hole of confusion and really long words. So disappointed but could not waste another day saying to myself that it would get better.
Lynn wrote: "Thank goodness it was not just me but I never finished it - sucks because I loved Gideon. This was just a hell hole of confusion and really long words. So disappointed but could not waste another d..."
I'd recommend actually just reading the last 30% of the book. Though that could also be a waste of time if the final book is no better.
Yeah, I -love- Gideon the Ninth, but just could not get into this at all. It turned me off immediately with the second-person narrative, (which in my opinion is a faux-pas. Changing the style of storytelling in a sequel is a strange choice to begin with) but quickly realized what was going on and just groaned. If you'd have told me I would DNF the sequel to Gideon, I would have laughed in you face.
Super glad it's not just me. I thought I was missing something.
Thank God! I am having such struggles with this book. Second person and what the heck is going on? I keep waiting and waiting for something to snap into place and make sense. I feel like I am the one who has been puking and sleeping.
I am halfway through listening to the book and this review, especially the DISAPPOINTMENT part, summarises exactly how I'm feeling.
Same here - at least I can quit re-listening to parts trying to figure out what I missed. Will likely just skip to the end.
Ha, I wrote my own review of this after loving Gideon, strongly disliking Harrow, and you put it more eloquently than I could :-) I was truly sad that this book was so bad; I thought Gideon was the most pure fun I've read since the first Murderbot book, so I had high hopes here. But...
I thought I was alone, ARGUH ! I'm forcing myself to read this, understanding nothing, bored with the extreme detailing and is doesn't go anywhere. I'm only @15% :( I may just jump ahead an read the last 30%, or quit. Great review- thanks
Glad I’m not the only one who wondered what the hell was happening in the book
Glad I’m not the only one, I’m just starting Act 2 (p 139) and I’m so confused I’ve almost given up on this book half a dozen times now….Gideon started slow but at least it made sense, this is excruciating.
I agree so much with this myriad of complaints. (I had to throw in “myriad” bc I swear she wrote it a hundred f’ing times in this mostly pointless epic.) F this book.
“The fact that nothing makes any sense, is compounded by the fact that the author tends to overdescribe unimportant details to the point that they clutter almost every single scene, making it very hard to figure out what any given scene is actually about, and what is actually happening in it.” Omg YES
Thank you. Gideon The Ninth was absolutely 5 stars for me, and I think I'm about to DNF this at page 83, and your review makes me feel a bit better about doing so. I've been so confused I've been referring to the Locked Tomb Wiki to try and understand what I'm reading, and in doing so I think I got spoiled for what is finally revealed in the last third. Perhaps that should help me understand what I'm currently reading but it doesn't feel like it is. And I won't even have a reaction to the reveal if I keep going, so I don't really see a point. Sigh.
Anna (Bananas) wrote: "I agree so much with this myriad of complaints. (I had to throw in “myriad” bc I swear she wrote it a hundred f’ing times in this mostly pointless epic.) F this book."
You might even say that she used the word myriad a myriad of times... *wink*
agree 100% with your response. would also add that the constant overwrought emotions (especially from people who are REALLY old enough to know better) was exhausting. the petty junior high level squabbles between the lyctors was pointless and silly. i loved gideon. when i finished harrow, i was just ANGRY.
I thought maybe I was getting dementia or something because until very late in the book did it make any sense as a sequel. I really liked Gideon but this is some kind of craziness that kept me reading because I thought eventually I would start to understand what’s going on. Even when it did start making a little sense it seemed like a pointless joke.
I’m so glad you wrote this. It’s exactly how I feel. While reading the book I was just confused and annoyed. Everything good about the first book was gone. I will still read Nona the Ninth because I think second books in a series are notoriously the low point, but I’m not nearly as excited as I was to pick up Harrow the Ninth.
This comment thread is the support group I needed after finishing this, imho, mostly pointless book.
I actually think that the final quarter of this book should have been published as a novella, with some tiny windows scattered throughout it into the material that comprises the first 3/4 of the book as it stands. That way, the confusing contradictions between that first 3/4 material and Gt9 would be a clever little mystery that was quickly resolved by sticking to what I think Muir does well, which is the strange emotional bond between Gideon and Harrow.
I listened to the audiobook, and got extremely confused as to where we were in space, because the differences between the 2nd person narrative and the 3rd person one just did not come across. I should confess that I generally find it very difficult to *see* where anything is happening in Muir’s stuff—must be a disconnect between how/what she describes and how/what my brain needs in description, but whatever it is, I just don’t see this world that she’s built beyond bone & technological anachronisms that I can’t make much sense of (a shuttle to bring light bulb filaments to the 9th House?!? What?!?).
And it wasn’t exactly a shock to find out who the narrator was, but then, because I was just generally angry at the book, I found myself really not caring at all about the stuff that finally did matter.
And now I’ve started the next book, because I am genuinely trying to understand what people see in this series. Spoiler (not really): she does the same ‘the characters you knew, loved & identified with will not be present/recognizable’ at the beginning of this one. Hopefully she pulls it out and gets back to the actual story soon.
15 hours into the audio book I still had no idea what the hell was happening and damn that’s a lot of time to spend feeling frustrated
You hit the nail on the head. All of those pseudoimaginary scenes with the characters quipping "is this really how it happens" made me want to tear my hair out!! We KNOW that's not how it happened, so why do we have to sit through SO. MANY. FALSE. NARRATIVES?? I completely agree this sort of intentional confusion is just bad writing.
Couldn't agree more. Just thinking about this book makes me feel angry, lol.
I agree with your review. I'm so disappointed with the story.
Thankyou for describing word by word all the frustration I felt reading it. I loved Gideon and was looking forward to her shenanigans in this book as well. I would have liked to know her point of view in the sense of how she thinks about Gideon and I did genuinely like her as a character in the first book. Now I'm not even left with that. It's painful, mind-numbingly slow and I'm glad atleast someone else sees it as the clusterheadache it is and not some literary masterpiece
This was EXACTLY how I felt! You articulated my thoughts on this book exactly! I almost DNF it through audiobook but pushed through. It got good at 85% :(
"And then they use a lot of really big words, and an overly verbose style just to show how smart they are."
This is what I felt like. Its as if the writer has a thesaurus next to her just picking the words with the most syllabels to make it sound hyper smart.
You've put my feelings to words very well. The only front I disagree with you on is that I almost think that last third is a little TOO full-throttle to the point that the pacing feels too much and things get jumbled. But you've done a really solid job of encapsulating my feelings on this.
huh it's almost like the second person narrative being extremely confused and disjointed represents, in part, the first person "bobbing up to the surface and getting pushed down over and over".
look, just because you couldn't read the clues and follow the plot, doesn't mean there wasn't one. there's plenty of clues to what's going on:
Spoilers for the first six chapters: Harrow is competent and conscious in the epilogue of GTN, and, grief stricken, asks God to reverse what she's done and save Gideon. Then, in first skipped-ahead chapter in HTN, we see Harrow is way less powerful wreck than she should be and Ianthe offers to "reverse it" and to save her life. We get a lot of extremely interesting details from God about how Resurrection may or may not work, the Resurrection Beasts discrepancies, his potential unreliability. Harrow gets a bunch of letters from herself that say "whatever you do don't reverse "The Work"". We get plenty of clues that she, despite her fucked-upedness post-lyctorhood, is still way more powerful than anyone expects (like doing theorems in the river).
Spoilers for the rest of the book:
Frankly, it doesn't take a genius to guess that Harrow's gone nuts because she tried to reverse Lyctorhood somehow, with Ianthe's help, and is trying to preserve Gideon's Soul in case she might be able to bring her back. Not a big leap to guess that the third person parts are her trying to rewrite her memory in some way to avoid eating Gideon or otherwise avoid the grief.
The second person narrative voice has lots of little quips about swords and such that are clearly Gideon's voice (it's a running gag like every other chapter that Harrow should call the sword end the "pommel"). Much more subtly: the third person scenes show that Harrow's internal monologue is, sure, snarky, but a lot less verbose+more clinical than Gideon's (huh, I wonder why. Is Gideon... better read and/or more pretentious than Harrow? Huh! Perhaps she's also an unreliable narrator?) It's ambiguous how much of the second person narration is affected by Gideon's vs Harrow's voice. Which is, dare I say, a possible plot point down the line.
Ortus, the author self-insert, keeps talking about writing a epic poem and his commitment to spoken performance... meanwhile the other dead characters are acting like bad actors in a play--no one's sticking to their roles and they're questioning the director. Oh it turns out it is a play? A play that dissects narration vs oration, and commitment to genre and passion? Weird. Must be bad writing, clearly wasn't foreshadowed at all.
Look, its fine that the book wasn't your cup of tea when you loved the action packed, sarcastic, genre-hopping, linearly told nature of the first one. It's fine that you don't want to work that hard to tease out a mystery of what's going on in the book. It's also fine if you hate second person--I found that really hard to get over the first time. And it's fine to leave a bad review. But disparaging the author's writing ability because You missed things and You didn't find it enjoyable is... arrogant, at the very least.
If you come back to this series and find yourself going: "ugh, none of these characters are behaving consistently" I would encourage you to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume she's done that on purpose as a mystery "hook" for the reader.
It’s funny you found the book “pointless and uninteresting” when you preface the entirety of your review about how you’re excited about other pointless and uninteresting video games and TV shows.
Paul wrote: "It’s funny you found the book “pointless and uninteresting” when you preface the entirety of your review about how you’re excited about other pointless and uninteresting video games and TV shows."
Ah, so I'm not allowed to like anything unless you approve of it? Good to know. I'll be sure to make sure my opinions meet your approval before I have another one.
Nora wrote: "huh it's almost like the second person narrative being extremely confused and disjointed represents, in part, the first person "bobbing up to the surface and getting pushed down over and over".
l..."
Yeah. I know. I'm not an idiot. I was able to figure that all out. The problem is that the book is still confusing, boring, and generally completely pointless, all the while being extremely pretentious about it. The book is extremely disjointed, and what plot there is to it is not laid out in a very coherent manner. It's frustrating to read. It's very gimmicky. And the author clearly has a very high opinion of her own vocabulary and ability to write meaningful prose. The book is just terrible. It's a mess. The fact that the editor didn't send it back completely marked up in red is a mystery, because when I used to work in the business, this thing would never have been published in its current state.
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Aug 05, 2020 01:43PM
my guess [still early in the book myself] is that its gideon narrating harrows actions somehow.
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I shouldn’t have to force myself through two thirds of a novel to get to the pay off/it to be worth it. Those first two thirds still need to be compelling or have something worth coming back to, more than “it will make sense later.” Just finished it, completely agree with you. It’s like she wanted to write a trilogy but was only able to come up with enough plot with this one by retreading the previous book and barely letting the plot go anywhere.
Aw, man. My copy's supposed to come in tomorrow.
Brian wrote: "Aw, man. My copy's supposed to come in tomorrow."I totally understand why someone may not like this book, but I love it. Form your own opinions IMO.
T wrote: I totally understand why someone may not like this book, but I love it. Form your own opinions IMO."
Indeed!
Yesssss thanks for articulating my thoughts. Nothing happens for the majority of the books and the whole time I was just thinking to myself "why.... Why any of this? It's useless". It was super duper frustrating not being given a single shred of info about the mystery and yes the writing did feel like fanfic.
I feel absolutely the same way (despite still holding trust in Tamsyn, everyone can have a bad book). Guideon was such a cool protagonist, with such a strong personality and a really particular tone. For most of the book we get a really plain narrator (which shouldn't be this plain if it wasn't meant to hold a reveal 12 hours into the book) and segments of a parallel past story that we KNOW are wrong, so there's no surprise when the reveal happens.And the Harrow in this book is painfully boring, not at all like the previous Harrow we met in the first one. Even with what happened and why, she should have kept her snarky tone and her strong personality, rather than becoming a blank slate.
A lot of characters are brought back as pure fanservice. And considering the huge cast of Guideon the Ninth (over twenty characters), it's really difficult to remember who everyone is.
I wish the story would have taken a different direction from the start. I'm sad that such a brilliant book as the first gets a mediocre sequel as this one.
I would say the plot structure of this book is something like Pulp Fiction crossed with Vanilla Sky.For me, that's very cool, but I can see what it would be frustrating. I think Harrow the Ninth is a significantly stronger book than Gideon the Ninth, primarily because it gives us more visibility into the universe. I feel like the world-building was extremely weak in Gideon the Ninth, although that might have been intentional by the author. I was left wishing I understood the world better. In Harrow the Ninth we learn a lot more about the rules of the setting.
Agreed on everything you said. Really had to fast forward and skip a lot of things I thought were unnecessary fillers in the beginning because it felt like it was just there to beef up the book and offer nothing to the story.
I did a review that's basically yours but less thought out. The problem isn't necessarily what was done in the first two thirds, it's
that it lasted for two thirds of the book.
I also wanted the escape I didn't get.
I just finished Harrow and came to look for other people who were as angry and disappointed as I was. I honestly don't understand all the praise it's getting. It's awful. Tamsyn Muir did succeed in breaking my heart with this one, just not at all in the way I was hoping for.
My dudes, I think you missed some of the point of this book. We know Harrow is an unreliable narrator, she's insane. Respectfully, if you forgot exactly who died in book one it's on you to check that shit. Personally I will never forget because some of my favorite characters had their day under the sun mercilessly cut short. And then you have to consider that they are necromantic gods, so the dead runners up for said position, that's a important bit of info to cotton onto. There's also a very good reason why bits of this book would be narrated in second person, and if that wasn't burned into your brainpan due to pure shock at the end of Gideon the Ninth, I guess find a less mysterious fantasy wizard to gush over. Harry Dresden seems like the type.
Dani wrote: "My dudes, I think you missed some of the point of this book. We know Harrow is an unreliable narrator, she's insane. Respectfully, if you forgot exactly who died in book one it's on you to check th..."Boring. Confusing. Frustrating. Nothing set up earlier in the book pays off in any meaningful way. 2/3 of the book is basically pointless to the plot. The reason for the book being written in second person IS CONTRADICTED WITHIN THE BOOK. I'm not shitting on it because I forgot the characters from the first book, or am forgetting that Harrow is insane. I'm shitting on it because it was a flat out bad plotting and storytelling, with a really annoying gimmick that doesn't even make sense within the context of the story. I'm shitting on being kept COMPLETELY in the dark without a single clue whatsoever to use to figure things out for myself for the overwhelming majority of the book. I'm shitting on looking back at that first 2/3 of the book now knowing what was going on, and it STILL not making sense. It was badly plotted. It doesn't make sense, even when you know what's happening. And it breaks its own continuity.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who felt this way. I read this review a few days ago it encouraged me to keep going, which I'm glad I did. But I had such a hard time with this book. It's one thing for a narrator to be unreliable, but they still have to be interesting. And I agree that the 3rd person narration doesn't make any sense. I will admit that I lost track of some of the characters (there were so many) and I also forgot what color everyone's eyes are supposed to be, so that's on on me.
Totally agree with this review. This book reminded me of how I felt when I watched the Star Wars prequels and realized that George Lucas completely misunderstood what made his own stories successful and popular, and dedicated himself entirely to another style with... questionable... results.
Agree wholeheartedly that Muir let the mystery linger far too long. By the time we learn what's going on, I'd gotten a bit bored of the mystery part.
Thank you!!! I’m about 7 hours into the audiobook and I have NO idea what the hell is going on. I absolutely loved Gideon the Ninth. This one is really frustrating me. Is there a good chapter to skip ahead to?
I completely agree with this review. It took me longer than it should have to finish the book. The first 70% was so boring. Then you get the last 30% that felt like the first book again. I think the first 70% should have been shrunk to like 20% (e-books make me think in percentages instead of pages now) and actually got into the real story.I'm truly hoping the final book will be less boring. Maybe a more critical editor could have fixed this.
Shingetsu wrote: " (e-books make me think in percentages instead of pages now)"Ayup.
Yuuuuuup 🥺 I was so sad about this book!!
Thank goodness it was not just me but I never finished it - sucks because I loved Gideon. This was just a hell hole of confusion and really long words. So disappointed but could not waste another day saying to myself that it would get better.
Lynn wrote: "Thank goodness it was not just me but I never finished it - sucks because I loved Gideon. This was just a hell hole of confusion and really long words. So disappointed but could not waste another d..."I'd recommend actually just reading the last 30% of the book. Though that could also be a waste of time if the final book is no better.
Yeah, I -love- Gideon the Ninth, but just could not get into this at all. It turned me off immediately with the second-person narrative, (which in my opinion is a faux-pas. Changing the style of storytelling in a sequel is a strange choice to begin with) but quickly realized what was going on and just groaned. If you'd have told me I would DNF the sequel to Gideon, I would have laughed in you face. Super glad it's not just me. I thought I was missing something.
Thank God! I am having such struggles with this book. Second person and what the heck is going on? I keep waiting and waiting for something to snap into place and make sense. I feel like I am the one who has been puking and sleeping.
I am halfway through listening to the book and this review, especially the DISAPPOINTMENT part, summarises exactly how I'm feeling.
Same here - at least I can quit re-listening to parts trying to figure out what I missed. Will likely just skip to the end.
Ha, I wrote my own review of this after loving Gideon, strongly disliking Harrow, and you put it more eloquently than I could :-) I was truly sad that this book was so bad; I thought Gideon was the most pure fun I've read since the first Murderbot book, so I had high hopes here. But...
I thought I was alone, ARGUH ! I'm forcing myself to read this, understanding nothing, bored with the extreme detailing and is doesn't go anywhere. I'm only @15% :( I may just jump ahead an read the last 30%, or quit. Great review- thanks
Glad I’m not the only one who wondered what the hell was happening in the book
Glad I’m not the only one, I’m just starting Act 2 (p 139) and I’m so confused I’ve almost given up on this book half a dozen times now….Gideon started slow but at least it made sense, this is excruciating.
I agree so much with this myriad of complaints. (I had to throw in “myriad” bc I swear she wrote it a hundred f’ing times in this mostly pointless epic.) F this book.
“The fact that nothing makes any sense, is compounded by the fact that the author tends to overdescribe unimportant details to the point that they clutter almost every single scene, making it very hard to figure out what any given scene is actually about, and what is actually happening in it.” Omg YES
Thank you. Gideon The Ninth was absolutely 5 stars for me, and I think I'm about to DNF this at page 83, and your review makes me feel a bit better about doing so. I've been so confused I've been referring to the Locked Tomb Wiki to try and understand what I'm reading, and in doing so I think I got spoiled for what is finally revealed in the last third. Perhaps that should help me understand what I'm currently reading but it doesn't feel like it is. And I won't even have a reaction to the reveal if I keep going, so I don't really see a point. Sigh.
Anna (Bananas) wrote: "I agree so much with this myriad of complaints. (I had to throw in “myriad” bc I swear she wrote it a hundred f’ing times in this mostly pointless epic.) F this book."You might even say that she used the word myriad a myriad of times... *wink*
agree 100% with your response. would also add that the constant overwrought emotions (especially from people who are REALLY old enough to know better) was exhausting. the petty junior high level squabbles between the lyctors was pointless and silly. i loved gideon. when i finished harrow, i was just ANGRY.
I thought maybe I was getting dementia or something because until very late in the book did it make any sense as a sequel. I really liked Gideon but this is some kind of craziness that kept me reading because I thought eventually I would start to understand what’s going on. Even when it did start making a little sense it seemed like a pointless joke.
I’m so glad you wrote this. It’s exactly how I feel. While reading the book I was just confused and annoyed. Everything good about the first book was gone. I will still read Nona the Ninth because I think second books in a series are notoriously the low point, but I’m not nearly as excited as I was to pick up Harrow the Ninth.
This comment thread is the support group I needed after finishing this, imho, mostly pointless book.I actually think that the final quarter of this book should have been published as a novella, with some tiny windows scattered throughout it into the material that comprises the first 3/4 of the book as it stands. That way, the confusing contradictions between that first 3/4 material and Gt9 would be a clever little mystery that was quickly resolved by sticking to what I think Muir does well, which is the strange emotional bond between Gideon and Harrow.
I listened to the audiobook, and got extremely confused as to where we were in space, because the differences between the 2nd person narrative and the 3rd person one just did not come across. I should confess that I generally find it very difficult to *see* where anything is happening in Muir’s stuff—must be a disconnect between how/what she describes and how/what my brain needs in description, but whatever it is, I just don’t see this world that she’s built beyond bone & technological anachronisms that I can’t make much sense of (a shuttle to bring light bulb filaments to the 9th House?!? What?!?).
And it wasn’t exactly a shock to find out who the narrator was, but then, because I was just generally angry at the book, I found myself really not caring at all about the stuff that finally did matter.
And now I’ve started the next book, because I am genuinely trying to understand what people see in this series. Spoiler (not really): she does the same ‘the characters you knew, loved & identified with will not be present/recognizable’ at the beginning of this one. Hopefully she pulls it out and gets back to the actual story soon.
15 hours into the audio book I still had no idea what the hell was happening and damn that’s a lot of time to spend feeling frustrated
You hit the nail on the head. All of those pseudoimaginary scenes with the characters quipping "is this really how it happens" made me want to tear my hair out!! We KNOW that's not how it happened, so why do we have to sit through SO. MANY. FALSE. NARRATIVES?? I completely agree this sort of intentional confusion is just bad writing.
Couldn't agree more. Just thinking about this book makes me feel angry, lol.
I agree with your review. I'm so disappointed with the story.
Thankyou for describing word by word all the frustration I felt reading it. I loved Gideon and was looking forward to her shenanigans in this book as well. I would have liked to know her point of view in the sense of how she thinks about Gideon and I did genuinely like her as a character in the first book. Now I'm not even left with that. It's painful, mind-numbingly slow and I'm glad atleast someone else sees it as the clusterheadache it is and not some literary masterpiece
This was EXACTLY how I felt! You articulated my thoughts on this book exactly! I almost DNF it through audiobook but pushed through. It got good at 85% :(
"And then they use a lot of really big words, and an overly verbose style just to show how smart they are."This is what I felt like. Its as if the writer has a thesaurus next to her just picking the words with the most syllabels to make it sound hyper smart.
You've put my feelings to words very well. The only front I disagree with you on is that I almost think that last third is a little TOO full-throttle to the point that the pacing feels too much and things get jumbled. But you've done a really solid job of encapsulating my feelings on this.
huh it's almost like the second person narrative being extremely confused and disjointed represents, in part, the first person "bobbing up to the surface and getting pushed down over and over". look, just because you couldn't read the clues and follow the plot, doesn't mean there wasn't one. there's plenty of clues to what's going on:
Spoilers for the first six chapters: Harrow is competent and conscious in the epilogue of GTN, and, grief stricken, asks God to reverse what she's done and save Gideon. Then, in first skipped-ahead chapter in HTN, we see Harrow is way less powerful wreck than she should be and Ianthe offers to "reverse it" and to save her life. We get a lot of extremely interesting details from God about how Resurrection may or may not work, the Resurrection Beasts discrepancies, his potential unreliability. Harrow gets a bunch of letters from herself that say "whatever you do don't reverse "The Work"". We get plenty of clues that she, despite her fucked-upedness post-lyctorhood, is still way more powerful than anyone expects (like doing theorems in the river).
Spoilers for the rest of the book:
Frankly, it doesn't take a genius to guess that Harrow's gone nuts because she tried to reverse Lyctorhood somehow, with Ianthe's help, and is trying to preserve Gideon's Soul in case she might be able to bring her back. Not a big leap to guess that the third person parts are her trying to rewrite her memory in some way to avoid eating Gideon or otherwise avoid the grief.
The second person narrative voice has lots of little quips about swords and such that are clearly Gideon's voice (it's a running gag like every other chapter that Harrow should call the sword end the "pommel"). Much more subtly: the third person scenes show that Harrow's internal monologue is, sure, snarky, but a lot less verbose+more clinical than Gideon's (huh, I wonder why. Is Gideon... better read and/or more pretentious than Harrow? Huh! Perhaps she's also an unreliable narrator?) It's ambiguous how much of the second person narration is affected by Gideon's vs Harrow's voice. Which is, dare I say, a possible plot point down the line.
Ortus, the author self-insert, keeps talking about writing a epic poem and his commitment to spoken performance... meanwhile the other dead characters are acting like bad actors in a play--no one's sticking to their roles and they're questioning the director. Oh it turns out it is a play? A play that dissects narration vs oration, and commitment to genre and passion? Weird. Must be bad writing, clearly wasn't foreshadowed at all.
Look, its fine that the book wasn't your cup of tea when you loved the action packed, sarcastic, genre-hopping, linearly told nature of the first one. It's fine that you don't want to work that hard to tease out a mystery of what's going on in the book. It's also fine if you hate second person--I found that really hard to get over the first time. And it's fine to leave a bad review. But disparaging the author's writing ability because You missed things and You didn't find it enjoyable is... arrogant, at the very least.
If you come back to this series and find yourself going: "ugh, none of these characters are behaving consistently" I would encourage you to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume she's done that on purpose as a mystery "hook" for the reader.
It’s funny you found the book “pointless and uninteresting” when you preface the entirety of your review about how you’re excited about other pointless and uninteresting video games and TV shows.
Paul wrote: "It’s funny you found the book “pointless and uninteresting” when you preface the entirety of your review about how you’re excited about other pointless and uninteresting video games and TV shows."Ah, so I'm not allowed to like anything unless you approve of it? Good to know. I'll be sure to make sure my opinions meet your approval before I have another one.
Nora wrote: "huh it's almost like the second person narrative being extremely confused and disjointed represents, in part, the first person "bobbing up to the surface and getting pushed down over and over". l..."
Yeah. I know. I'm not an idiot. I was able to figure that all out. The problem is that the book is still confusing, boring, and generally completely pointless, all the while being extremely pretentious about it. The book is extremely disjointed, and what plot there is to it is not laid out in a very coherent manner. It's frustrating to read. It's very gimmicky. And the author clearly has a very high opinion of her own vocabulary and ability to write meaningful prose. The book is just terrible. It's a mess. The fact that the editor didn't send it back completely marked up in red is a mystery, because when I used to work in the business, this thing would never have been published in its current state.
