She's into bones

 

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important! 

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines. 

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

Bring me a stack of red forms

 

I said I was going to read everything Tamsyn Muir has ever written this year and I meant it, but also I can’t find my copy of The Deepwater Bride right now, so instead I popped on over to Tor.com and scrounged up the hilariously titled Locked Tomb short story The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex. This one concerns the academic adventures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus when they are thirteen years old, although thirteen-year-olds with a remarkable ability to keep a straight face when confronted with a historical figure named “Doctor Sex.” 

The basic plotline here is a short mystery about a study that has been sealed for 460 years and yet, when it is finally opened, it contains--among much 460-year old academic detritus--a pair of skeleton hands that are unambiguously between 200 and 210 years old, no more, no less. Our bright young teen must therefore do some detectiving, which they do, and it is all very satisfying.

There are also lots of little tidbits and references dropped in about other things that happen in the world of the Locked Tomb, including some correspondence from Dulcinea Septimus, some tantalizing hints about the Resurrection, and a few jokes at the expense of other houses. There are also many excellent jokes about academic bureaucracy. 

Overall, a very good, if brief, read. Now I will go back to trying to find my copy of The Deepwater Bride and whinging piteously until Alecto the Ninth is published.