Is this book good? I really liked the first one, but the second one was a mess. Read it a year ago and I cant even remember what it was about. They were visiting some planet for something, there was an emperor or something and harrow was trying to kill him I think. Dont remember how it ended. Who is this nona supposed to be?
Harrow is deliberately confusing until you get to the end. That is unfortunately a hard sell but I loved it. Makes way more sense on a second read. Nona has similar levels of confusing but it isn’t as opaque nor does it jump around.
I liked all three, but the first is my favorite. (More Gideon plz.) Nona’s identity is the big mystery of the third book. It’s all on the Locked Tomb wiki if you want major spoilers.
Now when I think about it, in second book there was some mention about a girl in the tomb from the first book.
Can I read the third book with remembering almost nothing from the second?
There has to be some summary video on yt, I guess I will refresh my memory that way.
I spent my whole commute going over how much I liked these books, and then saw this post.
Harrow is a book about a person going through serious trauma without healthy coping mechanisms. Muir immerses you into that headspace (I’d say effectively).
It’s confusing! But it’s also a very true continuation of Gideon the Ninth, just as Nona goes on to do.
But the payoff is worth it, from a reader’s perspective. I’d recommend you reread Gideon and Harrow before attempting Nona.
And then we can all wait together for Alecto.
I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.
Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.
But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?
I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…
Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!
hopefully spoiler tag
I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.
I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.
The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.
Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.
And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.
The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.
So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”
So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.
Huh.
I had a very different experience, obviously.
First, “strange impossible unknowable things outside of our control” very much matches the Gothic Horror genre, but second, I had some of my assumptions confirmed, and others challenged.
As for the memes, you’re right, but I think “there goes gravity” from the end of book one prepared us for that.
John’s over ten thousand years old, and that is a long time, but he’s spent that whole time with a group of people also from that era. They’ve been rehashing the same dumb conversations that whole time. I got a kick out of “none houses, left grief” because I recognized it, but also the point there was to humanize the guy. He’s a god, sure, but he’s also a dork.
The eyes revelation was huge, and continues to pay off in Nona.
Gideon the First casually put the glasses on to deliberately obscure the fact that Gideon wasn’t in that body any more, and that something was in fact horribly wrong with the Lyctor process, and that all of the efforts of book one were (on top of being strange, impossible, unknowable) futile, which again plays into the genre.
Gideon having John’s eyes unlocks the mystery of her birth, why she was where she was, where she’s from, what she was sent to do, what went wrong.
As for the “the protagonist doesn’t even matter” point, I’m sure you’ve seen that applied to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Hopefully I’ve managed to share my different readings on your points without seeming like I’m just trying to knock each one down.
And just to be clear, ten thousand years is a long time. Ancient Egypt was, like 5 - 6 thousand years ago. So almost double that. The last ice age was about 12 thousand years ago. 10 thousand years ago was, like, the invention of farming as a concept. No culture on Earth has history that far back.
So to be making references to today’s pop culture that far in the future just feels nuts. I mean, sure, it’s the same one guy. And I know he’s not supposed to feel like God. But still, when humans as a species first planted seeds in the ground you heard a song, and now today you’re going to casually bring it up to a room full of babies? Whatever.
But it just so happens that it’s a reference that’s relevant to us the reader in my personal nostalgia? My eyes rolled so hard I fell straight out of the narrative…
Surprisingly accurate, Nona.
Is this book good? I really liked the first one, but the second one was a mess. Read it a year ago and I cant even remember what it was about. They were visiting some planet for something, there was an emperor or something and harrow was trying to kill him I think. Dont remember how it ended. Who is this nona supposed to be?
Harrow is deliberately confusing until you get to the end. That is unfortunately a hard sell but I loved it. Makes way more sense on a second read. Nona has similar levels of confusing but it isn’t as opaque nor does it jump around.
I liked all three, but the first is my favorite. (More Gideon plz.) Nona’s identity is the big mystery of the third book. It’s all on the Locked Tomb wiki if you want major spoilers.
Idk how to mark something as spoiler here.
SPOILER
Now when I think about it, in second book there was some mention about a girl in the tomb from the first book.
Can I read the third book with remembering almost nothing from the second? There has to be some summary video on yt, I guess I will refresh my memory that way.
You can’t really read Nona without Harrow. The things that occur in Harrow directly tie to Nona. But a video might do it.
Some clients respect greaterthan exclamation mark spoiler text explanation mark lessthan:
All three books benefit from a close reading and a good memory. I’d recommend a refresher or re-reading.
I spent my whole commute going over how much I liked these books, and then saw this post.
Harrow is a book about a person going through serious trauma without healthy coping mechanisms. Muir immerses you into that headspace (I’d say effectively).
It’s confusing! But it’s also a very true continuation of Gideon the Ninth, just as Nona goes on to do.
But the payoff is worth it, from a reader’s perspective. I’d recommend you reread Gideon and Harrow before attempting Nona.
And then we can all wait together for Alecto.
I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.
Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.
But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?
I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…
2 was fantastic, what didn’t you like about the ending?
Three was also great, all three books have such totally different voices.
I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…
Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!
hopefully spoiler tag
I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.
I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.
The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.
Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.
And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.
The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.
So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”
So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.
Cool…that was… fulfilling…
Huh.
I had a very different experience, obviously.
First, “strange impossible unknowable things outside of our control” very much matches the Gothic Horror genre, but second, I had some of my assumptions confirmed, and others challenged.
As for the memes, you’re right, but I think “there goes gravity” from the end of book one prepared us for that.
John’s over ten thousand years old, and that is a long time, but he’s spent that whole time with a group of people also from that era. They’ve been rehashing the same dumb conversations that whole time. I got a kick out of “none houses, left grief” because I recognized it, but also the point there was to humanize the guy. He’s a god, sure, but he’s also a dork.
The eyes revelation was huge, and continues to pay off in Nona.
Gideon the First casually put the glasses on to deliberately obscure the fact that Gideon wasn’t in that body any more, and that something was in fact horribly wrong with the Lyctor process, and that all of the efforts of book one were (on top of being strange, impossible, unknowable) futile, which again plays into the genre.
Gideon having John’s eyes unlocks the mystery of her birth, why she was where she was, where she’s from, what she was sent to do, what went wrong.
As for the “the protagonist doesn’t even matter” point, I’m sure you’ve seen that applied to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Hopefully I’ve managed to share my different readings on your points without seeming like I’m just trying to knock each one down.
Small extra rant:
minor spoilers
And just to be clear, ten thousand years is a long time. Ancient Egypt was, like 5 - 6 thousand years ago. So almost double that. The last ice age was about 12 thousand years ago. 10 thousand years ago was, like, the invention of farming as a concept. No culture on Earth has history that far back.
So to be making references to today’s pop culture that far in the future just feels nuts. I mean, sure, it’s the same one guy. And I know he’s not supposed to feel like God. But still, when humans as a species first planted seeds in the ground you heard a song, and now today you’re going to casually bring it up to a room full of babies? Whatever.
But it just so happens that it’s a reference that’s relevant to us the reader in my personal nostalgia? My eyes rolled so hard I fell straight out of the narrative…
Bone wisdom from the bone mage.
I’d be a little weary if they want to be my friend lol