Nona is a difficult character to relate to in some ways, because she's so human until she profoundly isn't, and trying to pick up her many unexplained ins and outs (for instance, around food) raises the difficulty level of the experience. With Nona I was at least more able to go along for the ride and try to take events at face value until something changed enough to reveal that I shouldn't. I wish I could say that made for a challenging and exciting experience, but instead, it kept bumping me out of the story. Much as with Harrow, I kept having to ask, "Are these characters alive or dead? Does it matter? Is death meaningful in this universe? Is any of what's happening on the page right now meaningful in this universe? What am I meant to be asking here, instead of the questions I am asking?" But Nona is so fundamentally built around the mystery of who its central character is - and once that becomes clearer, what it actually means - that it's very hard to emotionally connect with anything that goes on in this story. Nona the Ninth was at least more manageable than Harrow the Ninth in that there was a more or less linear story to hang onto, and fewer questions about what was actually real and on what plane of reality any of it was taking place. I feel like I'm in a perpetual struggle against Tamsyn Muir's books - trying to figure out which parts of them are meant to be opaque and mysterious, and which parts of them I'm just not grasping.
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