The Nine by Tracy Townsend incorporates plenty of tropes that were popular in 2010s fantasy—the grimy secondary world setting, the thieving lead, the proliferation of factions—but passed wildly under the radar after its 2017 release. I’m not sure I’d have heard of it if not for one Redditor consistently singing its praises and actually buying me a copy back before fantasy Bingo got too big to do annual prizes (thanks, Lucasz!). I feel a little bit guilty for how long I left it on the shelf, but regular readers understand the whims of the TBR. That said, I got the chance to pull it off this year, and I had a great time!
The Nine takes place in a fantastical alternate Earth, featuring at least three intelligent species—apart from humans, there’s also a treelike people and a physically imposing race whose strange eye placement makes them ill-suited for cities but terrifying when swinging from branches—more than a bit of magic, and a syncretic rationalist theism that dominates the human power structures. This religion views God as a divine experimenter, creating the world as a whole specifically for the testing of a particular group of nine subjects. When a book is discovered that appears to offer astounding insight into that grand experiment, everyone wants to get their hands on it. And so a petty thief making a seemingly ordinary delivery run finds herself in the center of a maelstrom that involves everyone from the academic elite to political and religious leaders to the most imposing bosses of the criminal underworld to one of the most powerful mages in the city.
The gritty setting, the focus on the city’s seedy underbelly, and the proliferation of perspective characters in the early going all go down as red flags in my book–not that they make for bad stories, just that they don’t often make for stories to my taste–but in The Nine, they’re adeptly brought together into a story that sinks its hooks quickly and keeps them there. There were moments early on where I struggled to distinguish between the shady noble and the wealthy criminal, but it didn’t take long for the story to coalesce around a tighter central cast, with the occasional alternate perspective serving mostly as a different angle into the main events.
Starting with the perspective of a poor teenager trying futilely to purchase the freedom of a mentally ill mother infuses the story with plenty of pathos up front, and it isn’t long before plot developments take the reins to keep The Nine a fascinating read throughout. Its handling of religion makes for an interesting departure from other fantasies is similar settings, building a church that is different enough from real-life religions that it never feels like a thinly-veiled analogue and adding the extra twist in the form of compelling evidence as to the existence and activities of the divine experimenter. The philosophical squabbles within the religion—and the acknowledgment of other faiths, both within the human power structures and those of the understudied other races—make the world feel lived-in, while also setting the stage for a whole lot of plot-related uncertainty. After all, as long as it’s not clear whose beliefs or whose power will be threatened by the new discoveries, it’s similarly unclear who has motivation for the various attempts to acquire the book itself or to intercept the scholars who had discovered it.
It comes together for a well-paced story that never lacks for intrigue and keeps the reader fully invested, starting with a sympathetic central character, building up a chaotic plot with plenty of uncertainty, and then slowly rounding out a cast that can draw the reader’s interest beyond one down-on-her-luck thief. It comes together for an ending that’s plenty exciting and ties up many of the interpersonal and factional questions, providing the reader a sense of closure even as some of the big metaphysical questions linger to be addressed in subsequent books.
One of those subsequent books is currently available, but as I understand it, the eventual publication of the series finale may depend on the first two getting sufficient readership for the publisher to justify the expense. Having read just one so far, I am confident that this series richly deserves that readership, though in a crowded fantasy landscape, quality is no guarantee of commercial success. That said, The Nine is an engaging read in a fascinating world that offers enough closure to be worthwhile even if the final book never comes.
Recommended if you like: gritty secondary world fantasies, myriad factions, big metaphysical questions.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Hidden Gem and Book in Parts. It also features Gods and Pantheons, was originally published by an Indie Press, and has Epistolary segments.
Overall rating: 17 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.