Review: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #3)

Tamsyn Muir's Nona the Ninth is the third book in the Locked Tomb series, which started with Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. As the title suggests, in this one we follow our main character Nona.

Nona herself is a... unique person. On one hand, she was "born" not even a year ago, she just woke up in a stranger's body and now she's afraid that she might be forced to give the body back. But on the other hand, she's quite normal, she lives with her family, has her own job, and has some friends in her workplace, which happens to be a local school where she works as a teacher's assistant.

The place she lives in also has two similar sides. Most people there go through their days as if nothing was wrong, but in reality, Nona lives in a city under siege, with various battles around the edges of the city, which can sometimes make it dangerous for normal people like her to be out on the streets.

Nona wants nothing more than for the normal parts of her life to keep going, and for the rest of her life to just go away. But instead, she and her family are in the center of the conflict tearing apart the city, so Nona knows that her normal life won't last forever...

Nona the Ninth feels both very similar and yet quite different compared to Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, the first two books in the series. For starters, there's the eponymous main character. While the main characters of books one and two (Gideon and Harrow respectively) are distinct from one another, the main character in this book is even more different. Her wide-eyed innocence and optimism are the opposite of Gideon and Harrow's main traits.

So much so that it can feel a bit off being in her head as opposed to Gideon's or Harrow's, especially when Gideon is so brash and Harrow is so depressed, while Nona is just so... cheerful and naïve. But once you get over that barrier and get used to this new main character, it's really easy to get sucked in the story, albeit in a different way than the first two books. While the first two books are carried by their mysterious nature, this book isn't.

It's true that the big picture stuff in this book can still be mysterious and confusing, but the smaller scale story has a lot more clarity this time around, as it is the simple story of a woman going through her daily life, making new friends, getting a job, and other similarly mundane stuff (more on this later), nothing as crazy as what happened in the first and second books.

This results in the book feeling more readable on its own, while the second one requires you to remember small details from the first one in order to fully make sense of it. Sure, if you start this book right after finishing the second one, you'll probably get more of it compared to people who have forgotten the fine details of the second book, but it's definitely not necessary, at least not to the degree that it's necessary for the second book.

While it's true that Nona the Ninth works better as its own book than Harrow the Ninth did, this still isn't one of those series where you can just start in the middle. You still have to go through the first two books in order to enjoy this one.

A big part of this book covers Nona's daily life, which can seem a bit monotone and boring, but here, the side characters really carried the book on their backs, making both Nona (who does become an interesting main character later on, but at the start... not so much) and the story itself more interesting. From Nona's family, which consists of Palamedes, Pyrrha, and Camilla, to the students in the school she works with, especially the ones who gradually become her friends. They're all so distinct and full of characters that this big chunk of the story rarely felt boring.

There are parts of the story (mostly the later parts after all the the mundane stuff are out of the way) that I feel like still requires more clarity than what we actually got. Simultaneously, the book also has some parts that are too clear and maybe should've been a bit more... subtle.

In between the chapters from Nona's point of view, there are chapters containing the Emperor basically info-dumping about his past and how our world turned into the world we know in this series. It's certainly fascinating and the writing is strong enough to make it compelling, but the fact that it's an obvious and unsubtle info-dump remains.

Tamsyn Muir's Nona the Ninth, the third book in the Locked Tomb series is definitely the best book of the series so far. It can be as confusing and mysterious as the first two books, though never irritatingly so, the way the first two books can occasionally be. This is because the smaller scale story of this third book is more down to earth and less complex, making it easier to connect to the side characters, unlike in the first two books, where the side characters can be a bit forgettable. The writing is still as sharp as ever, from the evocative prose to the distinct dialogues, making the characters all feel real. Fans of the first two books should, without a doubt, pick this up. 4/5.