Proper review, a month or so after finishing the book: What it’s only been five weeks since this book came out??? As a sidebar, someone once sent me this scrolling diagram thing to demonstrate why time seems to fly by as you get older and ever since I’ve been terrified of this happening. Why would you find the world less enthralling as you got older? I understand not everything is a first, but there’s so much to do in the world and it’s so fascinating why settle for letting time escape you?
In other words…be like Nona. Find wonder and joy in everything around you. Find everyone gorgeous and beautiful.
This is a very different book than the prior two, in almost every conceivable way: tone, setting, velocity of plot, protagonist, you name it. This time around we are yet again in the head of a character who doesn’t have much idea of what’s going on, except this time it’s not by design (Gideon) or by choice (Harrow). Nona has been alive for a whole six months and is excitedly planning her first birthday party and also she’s a 18ish year old girl who’s never been to school and is really happy to be living with Pyrrha (in the body of Lyctor Gideon) and Camilla-or-Palamedes (depending on who is in the body).
To get the things that disinterested me out of the way first: I didn’t really care that much about the various kids that Nona runs into at school. In general, I wasn’t a big fan of the whole school subplot—I don’t disagree that it introduced us to important characters, but like most people I am ravenous for plot and answers as to what all is going on and how it’s going to finish and what exact type of hell is going to be breaking loose. Nona and her gang of school friends doesn’t really whet any of that appetite. I am HAPPY that Nona is getting to relax and enjoy the world but also I don’t care enough about kid plots in general to want to spend time there.
But boy when the plot picks up does it pick up. We’re in a weird place, book wise, because characters like Pyrrha and Palamedes know so much more than Nona does but don’t want to tell her to avoid contaminating her memory. So they have theories as to who Nona is, and we have theories as to who she is, but it’ll take a while (and a lot of little clues) to finally get to a proper answer.
But. All that aside, and the millions of layers aside (I can’t even pick my favorite, but I imagine it is [how Nona loves everyone and finds them beautiful/sexy because she is literally Mother Earth and so finds all of humanity gorgeous—she is like the ultimate pansexual/demisexual, if she weren’t mentally six months and therefore asexual-ish]. I will end with some now-par-for-the-course keyboard banging about the emotional ARC of my two favorites, Camilla and Palamedes. Just ahhhhhh. Just ahhhhghiu54389798&*(&EU%H$H(UGF(D*YH$%ONHGPN(#V%(MTYP8gshiu x 1000.
“I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace.”
Legit my throat gets stuck re-reading those words.
Original hot take, seconds after finishing this book:
In tears multiple times, the locked tomb story.
Also
Go loud: the perfect friendship, the perfect love.
Also known as, “perhaps not the point we’re meant to get from these books, but it’s the point for me”