Harrow’s capacity for reverence is at times strained.) (The Emperor, we learn in this book, is a guy named John who makes bad pop culture jokes no one else can understand, because all of his references are 10,000 years old. Her fellows are fairly certain that Harrow will be killed soon, and Harrow numbly accepts her fate, although she still strives to serve the Emperor whom she has spent her life worshipping as God. Unlike her fellow Lyctors, she doesn’t heal instantly none of Gideon’s knowledge of fencing and fighting remains in her body as it was supposed to.

Something has gone wrong with Harrow’s transition, and she doesn’t have access to her full powers as a Lyctor. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark What remains to be said is for true believers only. If you did not already buy in on the basis of book one, book two is unlikely to sell this world for you. Harrow builds on the mythology Gideon established in increasingly baroque directions, and even though I am fully on board the Gideon boat, I still found this new volume rough sailing at times. If, however, you did not care for Gideon and, particularly, for the density of its mythology, or you feel like perhaps skipping volume one and diving straight into volume two, I feel compelled to tell you for the love of god not to do it. And if you are the kind of person who loved Gideon the Ninth (lesbian necromancers in space! what’s not to like?), you’ll love Harrow too. Regardless, I loved Harrow the Ninth, loved it with my whole heart: its lush and velvety sentences, its wicked sense of humor, its sprawling cosmic world-building, the tragic love story at the center of it all. Confidently I poised my fingers over the keyboard, certain that this novel that is so exceedingly lovable, this novel that I had already read three times, with its necromantic saints and showy metafictional riffs and luridly gothic family saga, would be easy to write about.Īnd then it occurred to me: Did I have any idea what happened at the end? Not in a cliffhanger way, more in like a … basic plot mechanics way? I couldn’t tell that there was anything wrong with Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to last year’s Gideon the Ninth, until I sat down to summarize it.

Gideon the ninth tamsyn muir