So far, this is my least favorite book in this series, but I can tell it’s building to something really big for the fourth book in this trilogy, so I’m definitely still going to be reading the sequel.
Also, given how much I enjoyed the first two books in this series, saying this is my least favorite is not saying much. It’s certainly not saying I don’t like the book. I just wish I could hang out with Gideon again, because she was my favorite.
Alas, Gideon appears to be gone for good. Instead we have Nona.
No one knows who Nona is, including Nona herself. She was given the name, “Nona” because the first words out of her mouth when she was able to speak were, “no no” and they decided to combine that into “Nona,” and now that’s her name.
Nona inhabits Harrow’s body, but it’s unclear whether she is Harrow, Gideon, or some combination of the two. In fact, there’s a lot of discussion between some of the characters of the book as to whether it’s possible for her to be a combination of two souls, but that’s a discussion for another blog post.
Nona has been conscious for about six months, but her body is that of a nineteen-year-old girl. She lives with Pyrrha, Camilla, and Palamedes.
Pyrrha was the cavalier of Gideon the First, and she took over his body at the end of Harrow the Ninth. So, Nona talks about Pyrrha using feminine pronouns, but also talks about her shaving her beard, etc., which got kind of confusing.
Camilla and Palamedes are sharing Camilla’s body. When one takes over, the other is unconscious and unaware of what’s going on, so they communicate by writing notes to each other.
When Palamedes takes over, he sets a timer to make sure he doesn’t take control of Camilla’s body for too long, because if he does, he’ll destroy her soul. As it is, he can’t help but destroy her soul, but he’s doing it as slowly as possible. The longer he has control of her body, the more quickly he destroys her soul.
Nona takes pride in the fact that she can tell who’s in control of Camilla’s body just by looking at her eyes.
Nona is living in a dystopian world, but since it’s the only life she’s ever consciously known, she’s not aware of how dystopian it is. The air is so hard to breathe that everyone has to wear masks when they’re outside. Nona and her roommates keep tape covering all the windows, although it’s not clear whether that’s to protect them from the sunlight, or for security reasons. They’re trying to keep a low profile so no one comes to collect and/or kill Nona.
As with most people in this book, Nona proves unusually hard to kill. She takes a bullet to the head at least once in this book, and all it does is piss her off.
When she’s not getting shot at, Nona kind of goes to school, but appears to be unable to retain any new information, and she’s older than most of the kids in the school. So she volunteers as a teacher’s aid, but she makes friends with some of the other students who are unaware that she’s aligned with the “zombies” (they’re word for necromancers.)
Meanwhile, Coronabeth has taken a position with the local government, and every once in a while they kidnap Nona, Pyrrha, and Camilla to ask them what they know about the local goings on. They don’t know that Camilla and Palamedes are sharing a body because Palamedes is supposed to be dead. But Coronabeth (who’s going by “Crown” now) manages to find out their secret.
Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha are all on a mission to get Nona back to Gideon Jr.’s body because they think, if they can accomplish that, Gideon’s soul will go back to her body, thereby saving Nona.
BTW, Nona is dying. She seems OK with this, but her friends are not. They’re pretty sure she’s dying because her soul is in the wrong body, so if they’re right about her being Gideon, then she should go back to her body once they find Gideon’s soul, Harrow can take over her body again, and that should at least stabilize things.
But when they reach Gideon’s body, Nona remains Nona, and it turns out Gideon isn’t as dead as they had thought. Instead, her body is being inhabited by a soul calling itself Prince Kiriona.
Prince appears to be a gender-neutral term in this world, although I’m not even a little bit sure of that.
In the course of getting to Gideon’s body, Pyrrha had to pretend to be Gideon the First, the ruthless killer Ianthe assumes he is. He manages to trick Ianthe into letting him touch her so he can take control of her body. When he comes to, he asks how long he was out. It was only a few minutes, but he says it felt like he spent much more time fighting Ianthe for control of her body, and that he has absolutely no desire to do it again.
What got me back into this book was the fact that Prince Kiriona seems to have a lot of the snark I loved so much about Gideon. At first, the party thinks it is Gideon Nav. They are corrected, although they are told they can call them Gideon “If it makes them feel better.” They continue calling them “Gideon” and “Nav” interchangeably after this point, which I only found more confusing.
After some more fighting, and a car chase, they all decide to complete the mission of opening the Locked Tomb.
That means they have to get back to the Ninth House, and although Nona has no conscious memory of being in the Ninth House, something in her takes over when they’re on their way there and she takes control of the ship and gets them safely to Ninth House.
BTW, my favorite part of all that was the fact that she was ready to give up and let them all die until someone reminded her that the dog was in the back of their ship, so she fought through just for the sake of the dog. Gideon and Harrow might have been heartless bitches, but Nona is a dog lover, and I lover her for that.
Upon reaching the Ninth House, they discover that it’s under attack from unknown entities called devils — the same entities that killed Column in Gideon the Ninth.
Ianthe tries to block them from entering the Locked Tomb, but Pyrrha still has a herald bullet in her gun, and she uses it on Ianthe, so she’s probably dead?
The idea is that the Locked Tomb is what makes the Emperor Undying immortal. If they open it, he will die, or at least be capable of dying.
Gideon claims that opening the Locked Tomb and making God mortal is what God wants, but no one has any reason to trust Gideon at this point, so take that with a big-ass grain of salt.
Upon entering the tomb, Nona has the sense she’s done all this before. Turns out that’s because she’s really Alecto, she just doesn’t have any of Alecto’s memories. At least not consciously.
In the second book, Harrow had been dreaming of Alecto’s body because Alecto had taken possession of her body. Once Gideon’s soul was removed at the end of Harrow the Ninth, Alecto took full control of Harrow’s body, but with a serious case of amnesia.
Once the two bodies meet, their souls switch. Harrow’s soul returns to her body, while Alecto’s body returns to hers. Harrow declares her love for Alecto, who pledges service to Harrow as the descendant of Anastasia.
Alecto then proceeds to confront God a.k.a. John, and that’s where we leave our plucky heroes.
Throughout the book, every time Nona falls asleep, she dreams of John telling Alecto/Harrow about when he first realized he could manipulate dead bodies. Earth was dying and the people in power were trying to GTFO without doing anything to save anyone else. All while telling them they were going to save them later.
Since John is telling the story, he tries to paint himself in the best light, but it’s clear he’s an unreliable narrator at best. Despite claiming he had everyone’s best interest at heart, he kills a lot of people intentionally and without remorse, almost from the very beginning.
So, it turns out the death of Earth was what gave John the power to become God in the first place.
And it’s what gave Alecto her powers because Alecto is, in fact, Earth’s soul. This explains how she was able to understand all human speech, but was incapable of learning to read or write. She also had memories of Earth’s animals, even the ones that had long been extinct.
So, despite the fact that the character who initially drew me into this series is apparently gone forever, things have reached a boiling point such that I have to read the final book to find out what happens next!