by Tamsyn Muir

Format: Audiobook

Primary Doorways: Plot, Setting

Genre: High Fantasy

Read for: Characters you like so much you’re sad to be parted from them by the book ending. Note: 3rd in a series. Not a standalone.

Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth is the third book of four in the Locked Tomb series. Knowing that each book in the Locked Tomb series features the perspective of a different character, I was very sad to be parted from Nona by the end of the book. I read one review that characterized Nona (unfavorably) as a manic pixie dream girl who conveniently is charmingly dumb but also has the exact magic ability needed to unlock any situation. This short sighted characterizing ignores the crucial aspect of the manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) trope: the MPDG is the object of love, a flat one-dimensional character designed to serve the purpose of others. Nona, on the other hand, is better read as the subversion of the MPDG trope. She is, first of all, the subject of the book and its narrator. We see things from Nona’s viewpoint. We don’t gaze at her, but through her. Secondly, while many characters serve to use Nona to their purpose, like all Muir books, it does not go quite as planned. Finally, the MPDG is presented as a complete, self-actualized object (who just so happens to have the goal of being a quirky perfect love interest). Nona, on the other hand, understands herself to be incomplete, confused. The fact that she doesn’t allow this state to deter her from loving herself and those around doesn’t make her flat or one dimensional. An anti-cynic is not by default an idiot.

While I loved both Gideon the Ninth and Harrowhark the Ninth, Nona offers the additional pleasure of being relatively straight forward in comparison. In each of the Muir’s novels we are given a narrator who has only a tiny slice of the whole picture: Gideon doesn’t know what’s going on at Canaan House and basically doesn’t give a damn, Harrowhark appears simultaneously haunted and lobotomized by her past, and Nona is surrounded by people obsessed with the question of “who she really is.” Perhaps the thing I like most about her is that she wonders, but doesn’t share the obsession. Nona knows who she is, she’s in Hot Sauce’s gang, she’s the teacher’s assistant, and she minds the Angel’s dog. It’s enough, even if there’s so much more.