I've had it up to here with this series being deliberately and self-congratulatorily difficult to parse.

Ah, Nona the Ninth, the surprise addition to what was originally supposed to be a trilogy. In my head, I apply the "this meeting could have been an email" thesis to Nona: it maybe could and probably should have been an epilogue to Harrow, because the first half—literally right up to the 50% mark in my audiobook—was slow, uninteresting, and ultimately irrelevant. From there, things start happening, but those things absolutely could've been flashbacks in the upcoming Alecto.

So, I think this author might have issues with pacing. A debut (Gideon) is generally likely to more tightly edited than subsequent books, and I suspect that's why book one has excellent pacing and books two and three have terrible pacing. For this one, the issue is what I mentioned above: the first half of the book serves little purpose. There's *some* character development, (view spoiler) and it was useful to get a snapshot of the impact of the House-BOE war on everyday people, particularly children. Otherwise, though, I would've greatly preferred either a) no Nona, however the two books around it would've needed to be restructured to make that work; or b) a first half more like the second half, in that the second half moved the plot along and developed characters who actually exist.

I did like how the author leaned into the gender-weirdness of Lyctoral body-sharing. This series has been solid on queer rep so far, so I wasn't expecting anything less, but I loved having people who knew Pyrrha refer to her by she/her pronouns with no slips or hesitation even though she's in Gideon the First's body. BIG SPOILER(view spoiler)

I recommend Nona the Ninth to readers who enjoyed/suffered through/cried over the first two books in the series. I'd say "with reservations" but we all know we're here 'til the end at this point. Fingers crossed Alecto is higher-quality, I guess.

Content notes: body horror, death, grief, war-typical violence