Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Series, 3)

I have a great love for the first two books of The Locked Tomb series. Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth were books that left me crushed in the best way possible. I'd been anticipating Nona the Ninth for so long that I thought my excitement would lead to disappointment. I thought wrong. Nona the Ninth was all the greatness I hoped it would be and more. Following from the epilogue of Harrow the Ninth, we meet Nona; a girl who is literally six months old even though she's *technically* nineteen. She only has memories of six months of her life and she doesn't really know who she is. Her companions have hinted that she's one of two people and they're hoping she'll get her memories back. If you're familiar with the series, the soul of necromancers being stuck in dead bodies is no new concept and we're forced to wonder; is Nona Harrow or Gideon? One thing I loved about this book is that even though you have to keep asking yourself that question, picking apart scenes that hint Nona is one or the other of those two people, you're also introduced to Nona as a character and she's great! Really. Nona is lovable and kind and funny and daring. She's extremly loyal to her friends and those she calls her family. Nona, being six months old, has a great love for all she calls home no matter how horrible it looks to the readers. Her city is a ravaged town, every day people get shot and there are dead people lining the streets but, if you ask Nona, it's an amazing place and she doesn't want to be any where else. Her friends are a ragtag band of misfits consisting of a girl unironically named Hot Sauce and a compulsive liar, drug dealer named Honesty. If you asked Nona, they're the best people in the world and Hot Sauce is a perfectly normal name. She'd do almost anything for a six-legged dog named Noodle! That's just the type of person she is. Nona's relationship with her family is an amazing dynamic. As a bonus, we get to look into the lives of Camilla and Palamedes (who we meet in book one) and Pyrrha Dve (who we meet in book one); characters you will come to love at the end of Nona the Ninth. We also get a full backstory to how John, the Emperor Undying, went from simple, scientist man in a dying world to God. This review would be incomplete if I didn't mention how effortlessly queer the entire book is. Pyrrha is a woman in the male body of her late cavalier and best friend Gideon and Nona constantly cracks up when people refer to her as 'he' (she also detests when they think Pyrrha is her pimp). Camilla and Palamedes both live in Camilla's body and swap from time to time and to Nona, that's just a regular tuesday. One of Nona's friends, Born In The Morning (yes, that is their name) has seven dads and I'm honestly still not sure how that came about. Queerness isn't some huge political issue in their world, it just is and that, in and of itself, was highly refreshing. The only issue I have with Nona the Ninth is that it's too short and I desire more. I cannot wait to read the fourth book.