One thing that is a little infuriating about The Locked Tomb is that every book has significant secrets from the reader and the narrator at the start. Hints and details get dropped throughout, and by the back half of the novel you understand a lot more about the early action. I only caught onto the main weirdness in this book after about 10 chapters.
While that early confusion can be frustrating, I implore you to keep reading! Nearly all of my early questions get answered before the culminating action, along with dozens of questions I never thought to ask! Muir is an expert at weaving together a narrative and world-building that pays off.
Truly beautiful space fantasy with just enough questions left over to leave you desperate for more answers and more books.
This series does not give up its secrets easily. It holds them closely and tightly like a squirrel with its nuts. I was left at the end of the last book with a lot of questions, and really pressing plot developments that I needed answers to, and “Harrow the Ninth“ wasn’t going to give them to me lightly.
The book does its best from the get-go to upend your sense of reality, attacking your memories of what exactly happened in the first book. It does this both in story content - it directly contradicts events as you remember them from book one - but also in the narration. style. I can’t say that I have ever read another book that spends this much time in the second person. It took me quite a while to get used to it, as I typically despise second person, but once I did it …
This series does not give up its secrets easily. It holds them closely and tightly like a squirrel with its nuts. I was left at the end of the last book with a lot of questions, and really pressing plot developments that I needed answers to, and “Harrow the Ninth“ wasn’t going to give them to me lightly.
The book does its best from the get-go to upend your sense of reality, attacking your memories of what exactly happened in the first book. It does this both in story content - it directly contradicts events as you remember them from book one - but also in the narration. style. I can’t say that I have ever read another book that spends this much time in the second person. It took me quite a while to get used to it, as I typically despise second person, but once I did it won me over. It’s use emphasized the tone, and set up some surprising reveals in the last act.
I don’t want to say too much aside from the fact that all of the strangeness and confusion is worth it for those big reveals, and I recommend sticking with the book through it. It is worth the ride.
The story follows Harrow in both the present and past, with the past reliving events from the first book from a different angle and with those big inconsistencies, while the present focuses on her experiences with the Emperor and the other Lictors, as she learns more about the truth of the state of the empire, and her role in it.
The book is full of interesting world building, conflicting personalities, mysteries, and occasional flashes of action and violence that are thoroughly satisfying to read.
I personally would not say that I like this one better than the first, because I missed some of the characters I liked from that first book, but this is very easily a worthy successor that does very interesting things with its narration, and it is a strong recommendation from me.
