It gives the story a more material grounding which enhances the more wild elements of the broader setting. Nona’s gang of schoolmates, led by the commanding presence of Hot Sauce, feel like real kids in tough circumstances. Nona also stays largely in a few locations (mainly an apartment and a school) but both are in a very real feeling city inhabited by ordinary living people with a natural fear of necromancy. It was suggested in the earlier texts that there are multiple planets and teeming populations but neither story had any real sense of that. The second advantage of Nona is that it escapes the claustrophobia of the first two novels. Nona, for the most part, is just Nona: a child with barely six months of awareness in the body of a young woman. Nona isn’t sure who she is and neither are the people looking after her but everybody is making a plausible guess that she is either Gideon or Harrow. So yes, it is another puzzle box but the puzzle is clearer. Nona also doesn’t know what is going on but the central character is both innocent and curious and not afraid to ask questions.

Harrow was paranoid, secretive and actively leading the reader astray so as to hide their own vulnerability. Gideon was a brash, swashbuckling story with a protagonist who was fun to be with but who never really paid attention to the complex puzzle she was entangled with. That’s a shallow criterion for judging a book but part of Muir’s writing genius with the Locked Tomb has been to pitch the style and structure of each volume to the titular character.

The big advantage Nona has over Gideon and Harrow is that Nona herself is just a lot more likeable. Which is pretty good for a book that takes both war and Catholic theology seriously. There are some good quips in Gideon the Ninth, and some disorientating pop culture references in Harrow the Ninth but only Nona the Ninth made me laugh out loud multiple times. The third but not final book in the increasingly inaccurately named Locked Tomb Trilogy is also, I believe, to be the most accessible, interesting and funny.

Nona the ninth review