It is so central to the experience of reading the book that it can’t really be called an absence at all. Gideon isn’t simply absent in Harrow the Ninth-her absence is weaponized in the service of narrative. I won’t spoil the ending of the first book, except to say that it is so strange, its world so gleefully unstraightforward, that one of the biggest questions I had afterwards was whether Gideon would (or could) appear in the sequel at all. Harrow the Ninth is a book which looks at this advice, steeples its fingers together, and says, “Watch this.” It should be the antithesis to the first book’s thesis. It should break the rules of its predecessor. Fortunately, there’s plenty of advice to be had about doing it: The sequel shouldn’t simply be a continuation. It’s the sort of fact that’s brought up so often one might justifiably doubt the truth of it, but unless there’s an army of authors out there lying about how hard it is in order to provoke sympathy, it’s true. “Harrow the Ninth”-the sequel to “ Gideon the Ninth” and the middle book in the Locked Tomb trilogy-is, in the words of its author Tamsyn Muir, “a story about how absolutely nothing happened the way you thought it did.”
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