Nona is six months old in a teenage body, living in a city under siege from necromancers on the ground and harbingers of the apocalypse in the sky. Her family want to help her discover who (and what) she is. She wants to plan a birthday party.

Things escalate from there.

One thing I love about the Locked Tomb series is Tamsyn Muir’s absolute commitment to viewpoint and character voice over exposition. Often in sci-fi and fantasy I’ll pause and think about how exposition implies that the narrator (who may or may not be a character in the story) is aware that they are telling the story to someone from a different universe who needs to have basic elements of history and how things work explained to them. Muir discards that entirely, giving the reader clues along the way but delivering everything through the lens of the viewpoint character. In Gideon The Ninth, that meant necromantic experiments and deadly fights were portrayed through horny teenage snark and ironic detachment. In Harrow The Ninth, it meant confusion about the parallel narratives until Harrow herself learns what she has done. Now in Nona, it means asking over and over, “who is this?” as characters are introduced and you feel like you should recognize them.

In fact, “who is this?” winds up being the central theme of the book. Nona, Pyrrha, Camilla, and Palamedes ask it about Nona; the reader frequently asks it about Camilla & Palamedes (they take turns inhabiting the same body, but Nona can tell them apart via body language); both the cast and the reader asks it about other adults in Nona’s life (since many have adopted pseudonyms); and as old characters you think you know come on stage they behave in ways that make the reader ask “wait, who is this?” If mishandled this could have made for a frustrating read but Muir pulls it off admirably – particularly for returning readers who are already invested in the world she’s revealing.

(And honestly, if you’re going to read Nona you should be a returning reader. I’m trying to imagine jumping into the series here, and I think it would be like throwing your brain against a brick wall. Plus the first two books are amazing.)

As an agender reader, one of my favorite elements is how Muir handles gender. By this point in The Locked Tomb books, souls/minds and bodies have been firmly separated into discrete philosophical entities, and many characters have been shuffled around (or continue to do so – see Camilla & Palamedes). In recent years as I’ve been glad to see more non-binary and agender representation in SFF, it’s annoyed me that most of the authors I’ve read seem to erase these characters’ bodies entirely. I think they do so from a good intention – they don’t want to give gender essentialists ammunition to say what the character’s “real” gender is (thereby misgendering the character and promoting transphobia). But for me, erasing these bodies gave the message that unless I aggressively performed androgyny, my agender identiy was invalid. Muir goes the other direction, giving us women with beards and deep voices (I’ve mentally cast Lance Reddick as Pyrrha), men with femme bodies, and NB folks of all descriptions – but the descriptions are there on the page. The made it an incredibly validating read for me.

Though Nona the Ninth is a challenging book, it rewards the reader and I recommend it highly.

Nona the Ninth is available for purchase (and is probably held by your local library). You can find it in print and support a local bookstore via IndieBound, or as an ebook at Kobo (or presumably most other ebook distributors).