4.5 stars
First Sentence: In the dream, he told her the words about where he took his degrees, his post doc, his research fellowship.
Thoughts: So you thought Gideon and Harrow died at the end of Harrow the Ninth. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. Harrow’s body is still alive, at any rate, but she doesn’t remember who she is. They call her Nona now because her first words when they found her were “no, no.”
Who are They, you might ask? They are Pyrrha (now living in Gideon Original Flavor’s body), Palamdes, and Camilla (who are sharing a body). They know that either Harrow or Gideon Version 2.0 is inside Nona but they aren’t sure which. They hope recording her dreams might help. If not that, then maybe daily necromancy and sword practice will wake her up. Nothing doing.
Currently Nona & Co. are living on a planet run by the Blood of Eden, an anti-necromancer, anti-Emperor organization. All of them have a day job as a cover. Nona works at a local school as a teacher’s aide where she mainly keeps an eye on the littles and takes the science teacher’s six-legged dog Noodle for walks during the Hour of Science. Nona likes dogs.
She also has a small group of friends from the schoolchildren. Nona was thrilled beyond anything when Hot Sauce let her join their gang. Hot Sauce is a burned girl with a mysterious past. The other children are Honesty, who is anything but, Beautiful Ruby, Born in the Morning, and the little one Kevin. All of them have secrets they’re keeping from each other except probably Kevin. But I wouldn’t bet any money on that.
A mysterious blue light appears in the sky which is making the necromancers in the population sick. One of those is Judith the Second who is being kept in the basement of a safe house by Edenite soldier Crown Him With Many Crowns, aka Coronabeth the Third. She threw in her lot with the Edenites after her twin became a Lyctor, but Nona loves her anyway. Nona loves everyone.
Then Ianthe the First arrives in the flesh. Well, the flesh of her cavalier anyway. She’s come to lay down an ultimatum on the Edenites, and she didn’t come alone. She’s got the Emperor’s daughter with her to back up her ultimatum. Wait, how is that possible? Isn’t the Emperor’s daughter dead? I know this is a world of necromancy, but they’d need to have her body to resurrect her, right? Didn’t they lose her body?
All of these questions and many more will be answered by the end. Nona’s story is interspersed with chapters where Emperor John is telling harrow how the Great Resurrection actually happened. And then at the end the Locked Tomb opens, spelling doom for the Emperor. OR DOES IT? I mean, this guy did reconstitute himself from his component molecules after Mercy exploded him in the previous book. Hard guy to kill, our John.
The Eclectic Reviewer 