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bloodygranuaile) wrote2022-09-14 03:08 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2022-09-14 03:08 pm
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We suffer and we suffer and we learn
I was having a slow morning at work Tuesday, during a week that I had been assured would be very busy (the busy has not happened yet), so I took a short break mid-morning to pick up my copy of Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, which the bookseller had to pick out of a giant pile of pre-orders. I was pleased that the pile, and therefore my copy, had black-edged pages.
Having decided that I couldn’t attend the launch party in Brookline because I thought I would have to work late, but then not in fact having to work late, I consoled myself by curling up with some fancy (sort-of) coffee and binge-reading the shit out of it, with only a few snack breaks.
First of all I am pleased to report that my guess on who Nona is–both the body, which was pretty obvious, and the soul in it, which I flatter myself was somewhat less so–was correct, although there was a lot I did not predict and could not possibly have guessed about both the consciousness that is Nona and also everything else. John did overtly confirm a bunch of stuff that I had previously picked up on but hadn’t been said in so many words about before the Resurrection. Also, like, wow, John is such a fascinating character (he sucks, of course, but he’s a great character).
It is entirely possible that, despite what Tamsyn and her editors say, Nona did not absolutely need to be an entirely separate book, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly so I am overall pleased that it did turn into a separate book. (I also have a soft spot for quartets; nobody writes quartets anymore.) Trying to figure out what’s going on through the eyes of Nona, the most ignorant character alive (in her defense, she is only six months old), is often challenging but at least as often a smugly pleasant exercise in dramatic irony, since the reader has presumably read the first two books and Nona has not. The constant oscillation between “aha I know things Nona doesn’t go me” and “help I have no idea what the fuck is going on” is probably not going to be every readers’ cup of tea, but it probably is exactly the cup of tea of the sorts of readers who made it this far into the series anyway, because we are all gluttons for punishment, especially if that punishment is very funny.
I’m not entirely sure what to say that wouldn’t constitute spoilers because in this series the terrain of understanding of what is going on shifts every couple hundred pages. We get some fun new characters in Blood of Eden, including the long-suffering and appropriately named cell commander/faction leader We Suffer and We Suffer and the deeply obnoxious Pash. Nona works at a school where she is in a gang of hilarious children, mostly of the preteen and early teen variety, who have hilarious names like Hot Sauce and Beautiful Ruby and Honesty (it’s funny because he’s a pathological liar), except for Kevin, who is named Kevin. The six-legged dog on the cover is named Noodle. Noodle is a good boy.
We also get John’s whole accounting of the Resurrection and the events leading up to it, which is fascinating, because John is a dick, but he’s telling the story and manages to sometimes make a plausible-sounding case for how he’s just some guy and the whole situation got away from him because so many of the other players in the story are also dicks. I think it’s also great because earlier in the series the question of “What if God was just some guy” comes off basically as a comical conceit, but by the end of this we’ve taken a real serious deep dive into why it’d be very bad for God to be just some guy, and also John’s constant “I’m just some guy” schtick paired with the “setting himself up as God” thing makes me want to throttle him (he’s not even wrong per se about either side of it; it’s just an infuriating combination). I do have some sympathy for his palpable frustration with the half-dozen trillionaires’ selective animal welfare concerns. There’s people committing crimes against humanity left and right and John gets discredited not for any of his crimes against humanity, but for his crimes against hamburger meat. Fucking typical.
The main plotline for most of the book is that the Resurrection Beast known as Number Seven is hanging out over the planet that Nona is hiding out on with Pyrrha and Camilla Hect and the ghost of Palamedes Sextus. This drives any necromancers in the vicinity mad, but there aren’t that many, at least not anymore since Number Seven has apparently been hanging out there for a while. There’s a lot of complicated plotting and intrigue between various cells of Blood of Eden and defectors from the Nine Houses, including the entire Sixth House, which seceded from the Empire and is now being held hostage by a particularly hardline Blood of Eden wing. Ianthe, piloting the preserved corpse of Naberius Tern, shows up to negotiate on behalf of the Emperor and to generally be a douchebag to everyone about everything. She arrives with a SURPRISE COMPANION that has upset the fandom greatly (in the best way). A lot of politics and fighting happens. Nona understands basically none of the political situation but her preternatural skills at reading body language mean she does pick up on a lot of information that is useful for the reader and would probably be useful for the other characters if Nona communicated it to them in a timely fashion, which she frequently fails at, because all sorts of shit keeps happening all the time and Nona is an easily overwhelmed baby.
As usual this book is incredibly Catholic in a way that really highlights just how fucked up Catholicism is, and is stuffed with references to the Bible and Shakespeare and Poe and ancient Greek drama and also the internet. This continues to be the only book series written truly and completely in my native tongue as a terminally online millennial nerd. I am, for Reasons, trying to remember what year Cask of Amontillado memes got really big on Tumblr. Might have to go read some classics to keep myself occupied until Alecto comes out.
Having decided that I couldn’t attend the launch party in Brookline because I thought I would have to work late, but then not in fact having to work late, I consoled myself by curling up with some fancy (sort-of) coffee and binge-reading the shit out of it, with only a few snack breaks.
First of all I am pleased to report that my guess on who Nona is–both the body, which was pretty obvious, and the soul in it, which I flatter myself was somewhat less so–was correct, although there was a lot I did not predict and could not possibly have guessed about both the consciousness that is Nona and also everything else. John did overtly confirm a bunch of stuff that I had previously picked up on but hadn’t been said in so many words about before the Resurrection. Also, like, wow, John is such a fascinating character (he sucks, of course, but he’s a great character).
It is entirely possible that, despite what Tamsyn and her editors say, Nona did not absolutely need to be an entirely separate book, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly so I am overall pleased that it did turn into a separate book. (I also have a soft spot for quartets; nobody writes quartets anymore.) Trying to figure out what’s going on through the eyes of Nona, the most ignorant character alive (in her defense, she is only six months old), is often challenging but at least as often a smugly pleasant exercise in dramatic irony, since the reader has presumably read the first two books and Nona has not. The constant oscillation between “aha I know things Nona doesn’t go me” and “help I have no idea what the fuck is going on” is probably not going to be every readers’ cup of tea, but it probably is exactly the cup of tea of the sorts of readers who made it this far into the series anyway, because we are all gluttons for punishment, especially if that punishment is very funny.
I’m not entirely sure what to say that wouldn’t constitute spoilers because in this series the terrain of understanding of what is going on shifts every couple hundred pages. We get some fun new characters in Blood of Eden, including the long-suffering and appropriately named cell commander/faction leader We Suffer and We Suffer and the deeply obnoxious Pash. Nona works at a school where she is in a gang of hilarious children, mostly of the preteen and early teen variety, who have hilarious names like Hot Sauce and Beautiful Ruby and Honesty (it’s funny because he’s a pathological liar), except for Kevin, who is named Kevin. The six-legged dog on the cover is named Noodle. Noodle is a good boy.
We also get John’s whole accounting of the Resurrection and the events leading up to it, which is fascinating, because John is a dick, but he’s telling the story and manages to sometimes make a plausible-sounding case for how he’s just some guy and the whole situation got away from him because so many of the other players in the story are also dicks. I think it’s also great because earlier in the series the question of “What if God was just some guy” comes off basically as a comical conceit, but by the end of this we’ve taken a real serious deep dive into why it’d be very bad for God to be just some guy, and also John’s constant “I’m just some guy” schtick paired with the “setting himself up as God” thing makes me want to throttle him (he’s not even wrong per se about either side of it; it’s just an infuriating combination). I do have some sympathy for his palpable frustration with the half-dozen trillionaires’ selective animal welfare concerns. There’s people committing crimes against humanity left and right and John gets discredited not for any of his crimes against humanity, but for his crimes against hamburger meat. Fucking typical.
The main plotline for most of the book is that the Resurrection Beast known as Number Seven is hanging out over the planet that Nona is hiding out on with Pyrrha and Camilla Hect and the ghost of Palamedes Sextus. This drives any necromancers in the vicinity mad, but there aren’t that many, at least not anymore since Number Seven has apparently been hanging out there for a while. There’s a lot of complicated plotting and intrigue between various cells of Blood of Eden and defectors from the Nine Houses, including the entire Sixth House, which seceded from the Empire and is now being held hostage by a particularly hardline Blood of Eden wing. Ianthe, piloting the preserved corpse of Naberius Tern, shows up to negotiate on behalf of the Emperor and to generally be a douchebag to everyone about everything. She arrives with a SURPRISE COMPANION that has upset the fandom greatly (in the best way). A lot of politics and fighting happens. Nona understands basically none of the political situation but her preternatural skills at reading body language mean she does pick up on a lot of information that is useful for the reader and would probably be useful for the other characters if Nona communicated it to them in a timely fashion, which she frequently fails at, because all sorts of shit keeps happening all the time and Nona is an easily overwhelmed baby.
As usual this book is incredibly Catholic in a way that really highlights just how fucked up Catholicism is, and is stuffed with references to the Bible and Shakespeare and Poe and ancient Greek drama and also the internet. This continues to be the only book series written truly and completely in my native tongue as a terminally online millennial nerd. I am, for Reasons, trying to remember what year Cask of Amontillado memes got really big on Tumblr. Might have to go read some classics to keep myself occupied until Alecto comes out.