Nona the Ninth — Dinaburg Writes

by Tamsyn Muir

Nona, like the other books in the Ninth series–which are definitely technically called The Locked Tomb Series (but nobody calls them that)—follows Gideon and Harrow as a showpiece of deep genre mastery and meta-narrative flexing.

Going into Nona about a year after Harrow, I vaguely, ever so vaguely, remember plot bits of the prior books. Nona the character, whose “the Ninth” honorific label is written in strikeout in the header of each page, is sort of an amnesiac JRPG protagonist. In standard genre convention, this is employed as the entry-point to explain the world’s quirks. Three books into a series could make for a good time to remind readers of plot-relevant detailing or to reintroduce foreshadowing that may have been peppered throughout the prior texts. Nona, the blank slate that other characters could conceivably feed basic information to, is like me: lapsed from the lore of the Ninth but ready to keep the series going. Nona the book, is, of course, not standard. It would never chart such a simple route. So if you, like me, have a memory that is only tickled by afterimages of prior characters and events, you get to live the Nona life for a bit: blissful ignorance of the larger state of the world-plot; muddled pictures of who these people were/are/might be; and the understanding that the tiny lives of the cast in and around Nona’s middle-schooling is the most important thing that is happening.

Of all the not-DQ9 Dragon Quests, Dragon Quest 7 is my favorite. It’s been sanded down once into a slightly more accessible portable remake, which is being fancied up and ground down yet again in an attempt to get more people to, I dunno, play it?

It is the king of the standard Dragon Quest because it’s basically a little group of guys you get to spec out with classes and skills and items, but they don’t really do much in the stories–they walk around the fix other people’s problems. Your adventure team can be whoever you want them to be and the game doesn’t need to account for your head-canon, because the stories are basically “you show up, fix a problem, and go away.” In the PS1 version, the problems are slow to discover, the puzzles are hard to solve, and powering up your little dudes takes a long time.

The second iteration wanted you the player to mostly be able to see all the stories with less friction and less wandering, and to be able to super-power your people faster.

Both when I played the PS1 version as late teen and when I picked up the DS remake as an early adult, once I got to the end where the grand narrative attempted to wrap things up, I lost interest. It was within the small tales that I cared. Nona runs into the same concern for me: it is magically good at making me care about Nona’s day-to-day, complete with Snark Chungus dialogue that, if done poorly is intolerable but here is employed deftly and lands with delight: “…[she was] digging a spoon into her mush and placing it squarely in her mouth. “Mmm, mmm. It’s so swallowable.” There is even a Simpsons’ quote, which should be instantly disqualifying but is, in fact, so startlingly well-done that I laughed, nearly out loud.

Once the action kicks up in the last fifty or so pages, though, I start to feel the tug of required-plot grandiosity and grow a little less, well, interested. I think it’s the shift in both scale and pacing. “Things” have to happen now! But no, they didn’t. There could have been zero movement in the large-scale plot. This could have been a vibes-only book, a pure set-up book, a small-repositioning book. It is allowed, after so much goodwill has been garnered, to just give us a Gideon Gaiden. Nothing needed to cash out here. In fact, I don’t really think it did.

While nothing has been gained, nothing has been lost. It is, as it has been for three books now, simply fun to read what the author decides to write. Nona is a good and fun book, the strikeout of “the ninth” on each page the most direct a review of the work as you can get: Nona is here, she’s fun, read the book if you liked the others. With Nona you get to learn about what you like more: the destination, or the journey.