Harrow the Ninth

I loved (5 star) the first and preordered this one and have just finished it.

Three warnings:
1. This book will make absolutely no sense at all unless you've read the first. Don't even try to start with this book.
2. Even if you've read the first book, you should probably reread it again immediately before starting this one.
3. I'll try not to post any spoilers for THIS book but this review will necessarily contain some spoilers from LAST book so if you haven't read that one yet either, go away.

This second book in the trilogy continues the story of Harrow and the very necromantic empire she lives in. Harrow is now a Lyctor and has increased exponentially in power, but she is also now facing bigger, tougher problems working directly for the Emperor/God with her fellow Lyctors and fighting fairly vaguely defined but terrifying things like Resurrection Beasts. At the end of the last book, we learned that the process of becoming a Lyctor requires the sacrifice of the necromancer's Chevalier, so of course I expected this book would mostly be about that. Which it kind of is but also kind of isn't.

The reason I give this book only 3 stars instead of 5 is just that it is TOO obscure and convoluted. I don't mind a little misdirection and an unreliable narrator when it's done well and you can still figure out what's going on, but this was extremely hard to follow. It jumps back and forth in time, alternating between the present day Lyctor story (told, unusually, in the second person) and then flashing back to parts of the first book now told from Harrow's perspective, but told very differently than how we read them in the first book (the unreliable narrator). And not just a little differently, but extremely differently, as if even different people were present. The author clearly wants the readers to be trying to figure out why the change and what is actually going on, and this doesn't resolve till near the end of the book. And I did in fact figure out who the narrator speaking in second person was in the "current time" narration was, and had a pretty good guess at why the changes to the flashbacks, but it felt as if it was made unnecessarily long and complicated.

Spotting all the changes in the flashbacks required a far better memory of the details of the first book than I had a year later, which is why I suggest rereading the first before this one. And figuring out the actual situation and politics of the present-time scenes was frustrating as it was all written intentionally vaguely. It felt as if the author wanted to keep the readers guessing about EVERYTHING right until the end of the book. And I understand the temptation here - to have everything finally crystallize at the end of the book into something that makes sense - but the problem with this approach is that it means your readers spend the initial 4/5 of the book mostly in confusion, and that's a frustrating state to be in for that long. It also means having to hold all the separate facts in your head for the entire novel like jigsaw pieces without being able to slot them into a narrative you understand, because you're waiting through the whole book for the clues that finally tell you how to put them together. And that makes this quite an exhausting read. I can generally read a book this length in 4-ish hours but this took me nearly a week to get through and kept putting me to sleep because I honestly didn't have the mental energy to absorb too much of it at a time, particularly mid-coronavirus-pandemic. Sometimes it's okay to let your readers know what's going on, or at least give them a FAKE feeling that they know what's going on and then switch it up on them in one quick reveal, but an entire book KNOWING you don't know what's going on is just very tiring and not particularly enjoyable. And sometimes when you create an interesting world and magic system your readers just want to understand that world and how it works, not be given little glimpses of it and have to keep guessing and waiting on clues; too much of that can be frustrating also.

As a result I'm sure I missed a lot of nuances that I would pick up if I went back and reread the first book and then the second again, but I honestly don't feel as if I have the mental energy to handle that right now. Especially if I'm going to have to reread both the first book and this one before reading the final book in the trilogy. I still feel as if there's a lot I don't understand though and I'm not totally sure if that's because I missed stuff or because it genuinely wasn't there and I have to wait for the third book.

That said, we did eventually get to learn what happened to some of the characters we liked from the first book, and why Harrow's memories were not the same as Gideon's account of the first book, and we met some interesting new characters also, and learned a bit more about how the Empire works. And of course lots more bones and necromancy - it's an odd world, a combination of advanced space technology with death necromancy that is unlike almost anything else I've read, the only thing that's reminiscent of it is Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer series, which also has that kind of gritty, decayed old world feel steeped with death and bones. I'll look forward to the last book and hope it's a bit less obscure than this one.