Nona the Ninth
Part fantasy, part space opera, and part apocalyptic nightmare ... Muir’s biting, hilarious prose is full of dark subject matter (violent death, creeping body horror, and various bits of effluvia and gore are commonplace) but tons of heart, deftly exploring issues of identity, belonging, love, and family.
It’s truly unlike anything else in science fiction and fantasy, and the best way I can explain its appeal to you is simply to tell you to go read it and find out for yourselves. (It’s worth it, I promise.)
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I have never fully understood the plot of any of the books in Tamsyn Muir’s gutsy, gory, glorious Locked Tomb series. At this point...I have made up my mind not to try. Instead, I wade peacefully into every volume with the knowledge that I am going to experience some lesbian necromancers in space, and otherwise I exist in a blissful state of 'head empty, just vibes' ... We learn more about the key to Muir’s mythology, and the metaphor living at its heart. That metaphor is both more Catholic and more current than the rest of this series let on, and it comes together with such tenderness and urgency that it could, like a Lyctor on a rampage, rip the heart right out of you ... Then Nona, who urgently demands to express her love to everyone she has ever met, will bring your heart back to life again ... Nona the Ninth is a deceptive book: Its sweetness hides teeth, and then its teeth hide more sweetness. As long as you go in without expecting fancy things like being able to understand every detail of the action in a literal and straightforward way, it will treat you right.
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It has grief. It has loss and cruelty and violence. It also has most of the other ingredients we’ve come to expect and adore from this series: exquisite meme deployment; sick necro fights; sick sword fights ... [It] will make you cry and tell you lies but—I swear—will neither give you up, nor let you down.
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