Okay, so first of all, I need us all to understand that I’m going to write this review without telling you much about what actually happens in the book. That’s because, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, every single event is a spoiler.

The plot of this series is a giant Gordian knot where each new revelation changes everything else you think you know, so you really can’t discuss any part of it in isolation. Or, to use the tagline Carrie suggested for this review, “I have no idea what’s happening, but in the best way.”

“But AJ,” you’re probably saying, “if you don’t talk about what happens in the book, how will I know if I want to read it?”

And I say to you, “Vibes.”

No, but seriously, these books are heavily defined by the Vibe(TM). If you’re new to the Locked Tomb series – well, actually first of all if you’re new DO NOT START HERE. The books do not stand alone. They couldn’t be less capable of standing alone if they were drunk on a pogo stick. If you try to read out of order, you won’t know who anyone is and you won’t care.

(If you read them in order, you still won’t know who anyone is, but you’ll care. Maybe too much.)

Secondly, if you’re new to the series, consider how you feel about the following:

1. Sword lesbians
2. Evil space Catholicism
3. Goth shit
4. Early 2010s meme culture

If you are neutral-to-positive on most of those and ready to become way too invested in a bunch of gay dirtbag necromancers (affectionate), then please go read the first two and c’mon back. If you’ve already read Gideon and Harrow and you’re ready to continue ruining your life, read on. I can’t wait to introduce you to Nona.

Now, as you may remember, when we left off at the end of Harrow…

Nona the Ninth opens with our namesake Nona, who wakes up each morning and recites her dreams into a recorder. She has no memories. According to her caretakers-slash-family, she is one body containing one of two possible souls (guess whose!). They can’t figure out which one, though, because of the amnesia. This doesn’t bother her. Neither does the threat of war or the looming radioactive monstrosity floating in the sky. She loves her family and her friends and petting dogs, and the rest is just background noise. Things are very bad for everybody else, but Nona is happy.

Her happiness in the face of objectively terrible circumstances shapes the whole story. That’s one of the strengths of The Locked Tomb as a series and also what makes it so dang hard to pin down to a genre: each book’s tone reflects its protagonist. Gideon was a swashbuckling mystery full of busty ladies. Harrow was as fragmented and confusing as Harrow’s disintegrating sanity. And Nona? Well, Nona is Pippi Longstocking in hell.

That’s not just a random children’s book comparison; I mean it very specifically. I read the Pippi Longstocking books a lot as a kid, and while I wouldn’t recommend them now (because racism among other things), they had an odd tone that stuck with me. From a childhood perspective, they were about this cool girl who had no rules and super-strength and got to do anything she wanted all the time because her parents weren’t around to be boring! But as an adult, those same elements are deeply unsettling. You stand outside looking in and think: “Something is very wrong here.”

That’s Nona in an nutshell. Something (many things) are very wrong and we know it, everyone else in the book knows it, but our POV character is blithely like “Huh, cool!” This is just her life. She doesn’t know any better.

In that sense, Nona makes a fascinating unreliable narrator. Every narrator in this series is unreliable as all hell, but unlike the others, she knows she is. She’s fully aware that she’s childlike and has very little short-term memory. She even has some understanding that important things are happening to and around her, but she just … doesn’t care. So we get a view of what most books would consider “the plot,” but it’s heavily derailed with discussions of what was for breakfast, and what games her friends are playing, and how hard it is to get Noodle the dog to keep his boots on when she takes him for a walk.

I’ve heard rumblings that some readers felt this book was unnecessary to the series, but I really don’t agree. That’s partly for the sake of the overall pacing: the book is a chance to take a breath between the disjointed “What the fuck” of Harrow and the very probable screaming “WHAT THE FUCK” of Alecto.

Second, though, and more important: it’s a look into the world of the Nine Houses from a different angle. Basically everyone we’ve spent time with in the last two books is ruthless, angry and fantastically unhinged. That’s fun as hell, but this book shows us that it’s not all there is. The thesis of the series isn’t “Humans are inherently fucked up and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

It is (or at least, I think it is): “These people are incredibly fucked up and it didn’t have to be this way.” There are people in the same fucked-up world who love each other, who teach children science and play with dogs. Our beloved trashfire protagonists aren’t doomed by fate – they made choices, over and over, that put them where they are. Sometimes freely, more often based on lies, but there was always another choice.

That’s also the message of the other half of the narrative, told in dreams by another unreliable narrator. The story he’s telling is supposed to be about how he’s the good guy and it all totally wasn’t his fault, but as he makes choice after terrible, unnecessary choice it becomes very clear that

Ahem. That’s kind of a spoiler, but honestly, not really. All my TLT babes love to hate Jod. John Gaius Haters Club 2K22! We’ve got jackets, it’s a whole thing.*

Both stories in the book are fascinating in the ways that they are and aren’t about grief. Nona isn’t grieving, but pretty much everyone around her is. Meanwhile, John is caught up in his past still, after ten thousand years – but he’s grieving all the wrong things. Grief as sadness, grief as rage, grief that destroys … we see a bit of all of it. Which, you know, given that it’s a book about necromancers, is probably not too surprising.

It’s really difficult to sum this book up neatly, much less give it a grade. Is it good? Depends – a good what? Is it a good mystery? Not exactly, it’s too convoluted and doesn’t wrap up neatly. A good story about the romance between Harrow and Gideon? Not at all, that’s barely mentioned. But is it a good installment in this riveting yet batshit series? Will it make you laugh, cry, and lie awake at night thinking about love and grief? Yes, absolutely.

Should you read it? Yes. I think so.

*We don’t actually have jackets. But I’ve thought about it.