Harrow the Ninth

I finished it. Do I get a cookie? I want a cookie. Maybe a gold star sticker?

I come down on the side of this being a flawed book that makes far too many demands on the reader in pursuit of its own too-clever-by-half structure. OTOH I did successfully struggle through the first 75% where it's not clear at all what is happening. Because every 15 or 20 pages there'd be a revelation of coherent story that was interesting. Or some delightful wordplay, like "the minute deaths throughout her body—bacterial, apoptotic, autophagic—produced a thanergetic embroidery".

There's a lot of brilliance in this book. Good characters, interesting ideas, fun language. And then there's a lot of self-indulgent wankery with plot structure and unreliable narrators and switching of whether the narrative is in third, second (!), or first person. I'm OK with some of that kind of gameplaying in writing. But this book had far too much of it for too long. Maybe if the disorienting part had been half the length or twice as interesting I would have liked it more.

Still I finished it and mostly liked it, so I tip to a positive 3 star rating instead of a meh 2.

This is a book for which "harrow the ninth what the fuck did I just read" gets many, many web hits. That confusion is not a compliment, it's a failure of authorship. It could also be a failure of the readership but an awful lot of readers seem to have had the same trouble I did.