Nona the Ninth

By Tamsyn Muir

Tor 2022

Nona the Ninth is the third book in the “Locked Tomb” series by Tamsyn Muir. It follows a young girl named Nona who is both six months old and nearly nineteen. Nona lives on a planet called Rho with her friends Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha in, “a building where nearly everyone was unhappy, in a city where nearly everyone was unhappy, on a world where everyone said that you could outrun the zombies, but not forever.” She works as a teacher’s aide at the local school. She loves dogs. She despises eating. And she may or may not be someone really important.

Rho is a planet in turmoil in a universe where planetary resettlements are so common that all of humanity now lives on only three planets, “…and they all agreed that this planet was easily the worst…” The planet is run by a militia called Blood of Eden, which has revolted against the Nine Houses and The Emperor Undying and declared war on the necromancers. This would be bad enough by itself, but the planet is also being stalked by a gigantic blue orb from space named Varun the Eater.

The success of Nona the Ninth hinges almost entirely on Nona. Asking readers to invest in a completely new character that they’ve never heard of before, in the third book in a series, is risky business. The character better be likeable, relatable, or compelling. Thankfully, that risk pays off. Nona is so full of life that she practically leaps off the page at you. She’s innocent. She’s genuine. And she’s honestly trying her best. In some ways, she’s the very opposite of both previous protagonists Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Despite everything Nona doesn’t know about life, who she is, and where she comes from, she persists in feeling, “…fantastically, wonderfully lucky, luckier than anyone else who had ever had the pleasure of being born.” In a world without much hope left, Nona’s optimism and good-hearted nature make her an easy character to root for.

At its heart Nona the Ninth is a coming-of-age story. It’s about growing up and growing into who you are going to be. Readers are told early on that Nona has to learn everything about the world from how to stay safe on the streets to how to dress herself without getting her head stuck in her shirt and getting, “hot and upset from claustrophobia,” because if that happens, she may have another tantrum. And she absolutely should not have any more tantrums. She has to work to make friends, something that is illustrated with both adorable hijinks and a seriousness only seen in young people growing up amid serious conflict. Some of the children Nona befriends are necessarily older than their years, making them interesting foils for Nona who is, after all, only six months old.

Interspersed with Nona’s story is a conversation John, The Emperor Undying, has with Harrow in a dream. This is a different sort of origin story. How a relatively normal-seeming guy like John becomes a necromancer, The Emperor, and also God was one of the mysteries introduced in Harrow the Ninth and it’s time for readers to get some answers. John’s story is as deliberately crushing as Nona’s is uplifting, making the two narratives satisfyingly complementary to each other. The two storylines keep pace throughout the book, revealing more about how John became who he is as Nona discovers her full identity.

The narrative flows beautifully. The two stories complement each other well. Alternating between charming and playful, and angry and full of utter despair, Tamsyn Muir switches deftly between the two narratives without breaking her stride. In the two previous books in the series, the pacing and structure sometimes felt like they got in the way of the plot. That’s not an issue in this book.

Nona the Ninth is a book that probably shouldn’t work. It focuses on a character never before mentioned in the narrative. There’s precious little seen of Harrow, and even less still of Gideon Nav, both characters that fans of the series have strong feelings about. To top it off, when the story begins readers find themselves nowhere near the main narrative thread of the previous book. Yet, Nona the Ninth does work partly because Nona is such a well-drawn character, but also because it’s about so much more than one girl’s journey to her true self. It is a story about identity. It’s about people choosing who they want to be and how they want to live their lives despite, or perhaps because of, the circumstances. It’s also a story about love. The love people have for life. The love people have for each other. And the wonderful and horrific things people are capable of doing because of love.

Amberlee Venters is a freelance editor and writer living in Northern California.