Instead, Harrow pushes us away with both hands as we read.Īll of which combines to make Harrow the Ninth, for me, a richer book than Gideon the Ninth, but one that is also much harder to love. This book revolves around someone who is dissociating with grief so deeply that she cannot quite bring herself to use the intimacy of a first-person voice, whose understanding of reality is so compromised that she cannot trust herself to report on it reliably to her reader. Harrow the Ninth is very much a book about grief, trauma, and mental illness, all of which inflects Harrow’s distanced, unreliable, second-person narration. Not that there are tons of opportunities for laughter to begin with here. So the easy laughter of the first volume fades away: The jokes are meaner in Harrow than they were in Gideon, and darker. That’s part of what helps puncture the grandiosity of Muir’s worldbuilding and keep everything feeling accessible and human-scale, no matter how complicated the mythology might be.īut Harrowhark worships all the lurid skeletal nonsense around her with a religious intensity, and she considers boning jokes prurient.
Gideon mined enormous amounts of tension and humor out of the contrast between its lurid goth world and Gideon’s straightforward “it looks like a sword, I want to fight it” worldview and her dirty jokes.
Harrow the Ninth is a trickier book than Gideon the Ninth, in the same way that bitchy, conniving Harrow is a trickier protagonist than sweet basic jock Gideon.įirst of all, there’s the problem of tone. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss anything!Ĭonstance Grady: I have a hard time working out exactly how I feel about volume two of this trilogy. You can read it below, and don’t forget to RSVP for this month’s live Zoom conversation with Tamsyn Muir herself. Our conversation about the book covered second-person point of view, the trauma of dissociation, incredibly bad puns, and more.
So as we turn our attention from December’s discussion of Gideon the Ninth to January’s discussion of Harrow the Ninth, I wanted to talk to Emily about what makes Harrow the Ninth work so well for her. I am in the second camp, and so is Vox’s critic at large Emily VanDerWerff. They are the kind of books that hardly anyone seems to feel neutrally about: You either despise them or adore them passionately. One of the most fun things about Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy, whose first two volumes are the Vox Book Club picks for December and January, is how deeply and wildly the people who love these books love them. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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