Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

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.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

4.5 stars

First Sentence: Your room had long ago plunged into near-complete darkness, leaving no distraction from the great rocking thump—thump—thump of body after body flinging itself onto the great mass already coating the hull.

Thoughts: Harrowhark Nonagesimus survived the chaos at the end of Gideon the Ninth and has become the newest Lyctor, one of the Hands and Gestures of the King Undying, the Necromantic God, Author of the Great Resurrection, John Gaius. Yes, God’s name is John, the most boring male name in the English language. He’s not nearly as imposing in person as his multitude of titles implies. He’s actually a nice guy who will sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit with you. Except Harrow wants neither tea nor biscuits. She actually would like her stomach to stop rebelling against her, especially since she spends her first few weeks as a Lyctor throwing up every time she moves.

Her fellow Baby Lyctor, Ianthe Tridentarius, the other survivor of Canaan House, shows up at Harrow’s bedside one morning with a packet of letters Harrow wrote to herself before they boarded God’s starship to go to their new homes on His space station.* This is the first hint that whatever’s going on with Harrow is self-inflicted. The next hint is that the chapters narrating Harrow’s present-day adventures are all in the second person. The third hint is that her memories of Canaan House, especially who died and who was her cavalier, are one hundred thousand percent wrong.

To make things worse, Harrow has to get it together quick because there’s a Resurrection Beast coming for them. And what is that, you may ask? The ghost of a dead planet, specifically the first planets that God killed in the Great Resurrection. Two of the remaining three original Lyctors, Augustine and Mercymorn, take Harrow and Ianthe under their wings to teach them how to meld their cavalier and necromancer souls while they fight the beast in the River.** Except Harrow can’t meld with her cavalier. And just to make things more complicated, the third Original Lyctor, “Ortus,” keeps trying to kill Harrow.

The storyline is confusing at first, but stick with it because it will all come together at the end. The line between living and dead is constantly movable and just because someone died in the previous book doesn’t mean that they can’t return in this one. Which makes sense, this is a series about necromancers after all. You’ll be rewarded with lots of cool bone magic (even if the bit where Harrow regrows Ianthe’s arm gets a bit too graphic) and awesome fight scenes. By the end we have more answers about what’s going on but even more questions about what the heck God and his Lyctors are up to. These people are all deeply disturbed and I love it.

*What does God need with a starship? Or a space station?

**I’m not explaining the River to you. Read the book.

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

5 stars

First Sentence: In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Thoughts: I found this book in the fantasy section because it’s about necromancers, but it’s not really fantasy. The necromancers live in space so it’s also science fiction. It’s also a murder mystery because necromancers keep dying. It’s a book of many genres, all of them awesome.

Gideon lives in Drearburh, the seat of the Ninth House of the Necromantic God. She doesn’t want to be there. She’s not really one of the Ninth, anyway; her mother had fallen onto the planet from the Eighth House and died after giving birth. Then she was boiled and resurrected as a skeleton because the Ninth House is the house of bone magic. They need lots of skeleton servants because the house is dying off. There are only two people left under the age of thirty-five: Gideon and the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, the current Ninth necromancer.

Harrow gets an invitation to Canaan House to join the Lyctor tryouts. The God-Emperor’s Lyctors have been dying off and He needs to replenish the ranks. All the necromantic scions of the other seven houses* come to try out. But not alone. Each necromancer needs a cavalier for reasons that are explained by a single word: Tradition!

There’s also another reason, but they don’t figure that out until the end.

Ortus, the Ninth House cavalier, is a spineless little mama’s boy and he doesn’t want to go to Canaan House. He runs off with his mom back to her old House and promptly gets blown up. So Harrow picks the only other person who a) can handle a sword and b) isn’t decrepit: Gideon. She isn’t thrilled about it, but since Harrow promises Gideon that she’ll allow her to join the Cohort when all this is over, she goes along with it.

Gideon and Harrow have been getting on each others’ nerves since childhood, so Gideon’s not too upset when Harrow ditches her the very first day to explore Canaan House alone. She’s left instructions for her cavalier, though: remember to paint your face like a skull in the approved Ninth House way and don’t talk to anyone. Gideon does this and finds out it’s a great way to find out more about the other necromancers and their cavaliers than she would have otherwise.

Most of them are insufferable. Magnus, the Fifth House cavalier is all right, and the Seventh House necromancer, Dulcinea, is really, really hot, so she spends most of her time with then until Harrow returns and needs Gideon to go down to the basement with her. She’s found something in one of the labs that she needs another pair of eyes to check. It’s a necromantic puzzle and the labs are full of them. Together Gideon and Harrow work through the puzzles, collecting a new key at the end of each one. But there’s only a limited number of keys to go around and some of the other Houses have collected the others.

And then they find the Fifth House necromancer and cavalier dead at the bottom of a staircase. A staircase they were pushed down. Now they have a killer in their midst.

To solve the mystery and the puzzles, the remaining Houses are going to have to share their keys, but not without a lot of arguing first. In the midst of all this folderol, Harrow and Gideon finally tell each other the truth about their childhoods and let go of a lot of the baggage they’ve been carrying around.

It’s a weird story and a wild ride. Gideon has a great sense of humor and there’s a lot of cool necromancy being thrown around. I agree with Warren Ellis, author of the excellent Transmetropolitan series. His blurb on the back cover said that Muir is totally insane. Coming from him, that’s the highest praise and totally deserved.

*The First House is the Emperor and his Lyctors.