Matthew's Journal

This is the third book in the Locked Tomb series (it was going to be a trilogy, but this book is an extra - essentially a book-length first act of the final book); I really liked the first book (Gideon the Ninth), and didn't get on with the second (Harrow the Ninth)[warning: linked post has key plot spoilers for both books].

Nona is a little less confusing than Harrow, but still quite confusing - I found myself checking online for characters to remind myself who they were (or what they'd done in the past two books), and I have to admit that when I read the Nona plot summary on WP after finishing I discovered that I'd missed a couple of nuances of what was going on! But it's less "contradict what you were sure happened in the previous book", so it was a bit easier to try and work out what was going on, or at least easier to enjoy the story without being quite so baffled!

Who Nona herself is is a mystery for much of the book (although we get clues, and you might have an idea based on the ending of Harrow), but we learn more about her and the world she's in as time goes by. Separately, there's a series of dream sequences that give us more of the back-story for how the Emperor Undying came to be [a minor gripe: having the chapter titles be Biblical references is cute, but providing the text of the verse as well would have been kinder - I'm quite Biblically literate, but I still can't tell you what "John 5:4" is without looking it up, and having to get up to find a Bible each time I got to one of those chapters was annoying], which were interesting (if unreliably narrated).

The plot is twisty, and very readable, although I'm not entirely sure if it all actually makes sense; I suspect I'm going to end up wanting to do a re-read of the entire series once it's all finished.

I suspect this is going to be on the 2023 Hugo Award shortlist...