Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

This is, without exaggeration, one of the best books ever written. After finishing Gideon, I was so excited to start Harrow, and it absolutely lived up. It’s so weird and so clever and balances humour with tragedy so incredibly well — the entire series is worth it for this book, and the final book isn’t even out yet.

This book literally has something for everyone—a round up of the best meme references that will shock you into laughter on the bus, mysteries that pull you in and unfold beautifully, and some of the most insane-making character dynamics I’ve ever encountered.

Something unique that might be difficult to work through is that this book is (mostly) written in second person (sort of), and that on top of that it’s deliberately confusing. The narrator is unreliable as all hell and also the things that are happening are just… weird. Every page felt like two from a normal book, just from the amount of thinking that I had to do to figure out what everything was about. 

I was constantly asking myself ‘did that actually happen?’ and I could only answer myself half the time. I’m still not convinced the bathtub scene actually happened, or that [redacted] was hiding under Harrow’s bed. I spent the entire book trying to figure out who the narrator was and who the Sleeper was and what was going on—I was texting people my updated theories and getting very funny ‘I’m not saying anything!’ replies. And the payoffs for both those reveals were incredible, so I’m glad that I didn’t know and that they didn’t (directly) tell me.

There are a few scenes in the book that feel almost like deus ex machina (pun intended) but they’re so well built up to that they still work and feel earned, rather than like a true out-of-thin-air solution. The build up earns these huge cinematic moments and makes the entire thing absolutely worth it. 

I originally wrote this review and ended it saying that I couldn’t wait for Nona to arrive, as I’d already bought it online. I’ve recieved and finished that one since then, so now I’ll say that I cannot wait for Alecto the Ninth to come out. I really hope it’s this year.

Once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.