Book Review: Harrow the Ninth

Harrow the Ninth
by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Note: I kept thinking I would write more of a 'review' and less of a WTF statement about this; but it's so hard to conceptualize and put into writing how I felt about this book. Just like book 1, Harrow the Ninth is intangible in its affect on the reader. So please forgive this vagueness of this review and know that I loved this, and loved to hate it at times. And was exhausted when I was finally done reading it. 

After 200+ pages, few words written are not insane or from the eyes of our unreliable narrator, Harrow. She can’t seem to remember what we, the reader, know happened at the end of book 1. It’s infuriating, it’s slow reading, it made me start to think I might not reach the end, and lament how great I thought Gideon the Ninth was. And then things start to open up, there might be hope for Harrow and her shattered mind, and just when I thought things were realigning crazy, epic, unbelievable events happen. So unbelievable that without the drone of insanity I read beforehand I might have scoffed and not believed any of it.

As with book 1, I am unsure what I just spent 19 days reading. Harrow the Ninth has put me 6 more books behind on my reading challenge and I’m not even sure I know what happened in it; and I’m certain I don’t understand more than half of the subtle, and not so subtle, messages Muir is saying.
Did I like this book? Maybe. Do I want to read book 3? I dunno. Mostly I just want to read book 1 again and recapture Gideon. But at the end of the day absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? If true then Muir plays her cards well.

When Alice falls down the rabbit hole the reader experienced a mind expanding story. When Harrow wakes up on a grand spaceship; with blood, bones and vomit surrounding her, the reader will begin to forget they even have a mind. I wondered by the end of the novel how living and dying could be so complex given it’s just made of meat, bones, blood, and time.

Harrow the Ninth makes our messed-up, immoral, crazy world seem simple. And so I give it five stars if only because it strained my mind enough to have less time for the real world insanity that surrounds us all. I feel helpless to affect much of today’s news; just as Harrow felt helpless to comprehend how she was who she was. Perhaps that’s the brilliance of Muir’s lesbian necromancers in space literary writing; she convinces me the world I live in is simple, because her world is so complex.

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