Nona is an absolute sweetheart who just wants to love her friends and family to the fullest, impress Hot Sauce, and walk the teacher’s six-legged dog named Noodle. Hot Sauce is the too-cool-for-school leader of her friend group Beautiful Ruby, born in the Morning Honesty and Kevin are all part of this tight-knit, group of badass and feral children. Nona is a teacher’s aide at her local school where she has friends with the most amazing names. I may miss both Harrow and Gideon, but Nona is a ray of sunshine. It’s an absolute chad move to have two novels, back-to-back, that have our main characters not be themselves with absolutely no clue as to what’s going on, but it’s never difficult to follow or even upsetting to read. She is almost an exactly foil of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Our protagonists wake up and analyze Nona’s dreams and try to feed her eggs, even though she absolutely hates eggs. We, as readers, experience Nona as she lives with Camilla, Palamedes (in the body of Camilla), and Pyrra (in the body of her dead Cavalier, Gideon the First). If Harrow the Ninth was a Rubik’s Cube that Tamsyn Muir handed readers to solve, Nona the Ninth is like an Etch-A-Sketch that she’s finishing and she can’t wait to show you in the best possible way. Whereas, Nona the Ninth introduces us to someone who looks like Harrow but isn’t and who is six-months-old, but in the body of a nineteen-year-old. The events of Harrow the Ninth involve Harrow, quite literally, not knowing herself (live, laugh, lobotomy – because Harrow giving herself a lobotomy just to keep Gideon Nav alive is still one of the most romantic things I’ve ever read) as she tried to evade certain death at the hands of her fellow Lyctors. I’m happy to have done so because Nona is full of love. I was overjoyed with excitement to hear that the next book (scheduled to have been Alecto the Ninth) will actually be the fourth book and I welcomed Nona with open arms. Following the events of the second book, Harrow the Ninth, Nona comes as a complete surprise. Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, published by TorDotCom, is the third book in The Locked Tomb series.

Nona the locked tomb