I am in awe of this book.

I already talked about the use of language in my review for Gideon the Ninth and that’s still there. Tamsyn continues to impress on a sentence-by-sentence level. Breadth of vocabulary without sounding like they swallowed a thesaurus, deliberate humor built into the structure of sentences, and also into the publication of the book’s actual formatting.

But on top of that it’s so different! I read and enjoy a lot of fantasy and sci-fi have never read anything like this. The characters are so real, especially considering the number of immortal deities and demi-gods among them.

And never before have I read a book and thought “Wait, am I crazy? That didn’t happen, right? That can’t have happened? Did I imagine what happened before?”. I did here, in the best possible way. The way all the story threads come together is marvellous and a real page-turner.

I was also very much not prepared for (ending spoilers) “Hi Not Fucking Dead, I’m Dad”. Or the character named after Eminem and Evanescence songs!? The delivery of that is both hilarious, and also actually gives us a lot of information. It suggests the Resurrection happened 10,000 years ago at a time not far from the current present day.

And I have to repeat myself, that Harrowhark Nonagesimus is a great name.

Anyway.

Read this book. You’ll enjoy it.

Harrow the Ninth

By Tamsyn Muir

See on Storygraph

See on Goodreads

20

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20

Reference links: Why I like Storygraph, My concerns with Goodreads, How my scoring system works