She loves the people who care for her (people readers know well, who have secrets to keep and lives to save). Nona doesn’t know who she is, both literally and metaphorically, but she’s a quick study - and more importantly, she knows who she loves. '.The excellent 'Nona' brings Muir’s space opera down to not-earth, leaving behind the haunted gothic palaces, space stations and graveyard-dormitory hybrids of the first two novels to explore life in a city far away from the godlike necromancers called Lyctors (and the godlike God named John.) But much like Nona chafes against those restrictions, I did too. So many aspects of her existence are relatable and even sweet, but the way she's surrounded at all times by adults with mysterious agendas who are deliberately hiding major truths from her is frustrating, and feels like a metaphor for reading this book itself - there's the perpetual feeling that the author is withholding everything we need, and saying it's for our own good, to make a better story. Nona is a difficult character to relate to in some ways, because she's so human until she profoundly isn't, and trying to pick up her many unexplained ins and outs (for instance, around food) raises the difficulty level of the experience. With Nona I was at least more able to go along for the ride and try to take events at face value until something changed enough to reveal that I shouldn't.

I wish I could say that made for a challenging and exciting experience, but instead, it kept bumping me out of the story. Much as with Harrow, I kept having to ask, 'Are these characters alive or dead? Does it matter? Is death meaningful in this universe? Is any of what's happening on the page right now meaningful in this universe? What am I meant to be asking here, instead of the questions I am asking?' But Nona is so fundamentally built around the mystery of who its central character is - and once that becomes clearer, what it actually means - that it's very hard to emotionally connect with anything that goes on in this story.

Nona the Ninth was at least more manageable than Harrow the Ninth in that there was a more or less linear story to hang onto, and fewer questions about what was actually real and on what plane of reality any of it was taking place. I feel like I'm in a perpetual struggle against Tamsyn Muir's books - trying to figure out which parts of them are meant to be opaque and mysterious, and which parts of them I'm just not grasping.

Alecto the ninth cover