I found your tags in the locked tomb reading order post and they are hilarious. How do you even finish that book without context? what was it even like?
And also do you think it makes less or more sense (before the end) to read it without having read gtn?
Omg hi.
So, in my slight defense, when I first got into the series I was working a baking job, so I was waking up early and listening to the audio books on my shift. I like to tell myself that if I’d been looking at the physical copies every time I might have noticed some sort of “sequel of” or the like. It’s a nice little bit of hope I keep for my own sanity.
For most of my first time through HtN, I legitimately thought that Muir was just very anti-hand holding. I read a lot of dense SFF through my undergrad and it seemed plausible enough that an author would just dump you in and have you figure out wide scale things like the entirety of the cavalier system. The entirety of Harrow’s amnesia also made sense to me as an entry point like “ah we’re discovering this along with her”.
It doesn’t help that I struggle with audio processing and a short attention span (typically why I go for physical copies or multiple listen throughs) so I was also writing off a lot of my confusion to just assuming that I had forgotten names or glazed over plot points.
The last third or so was when I really started to think something was up. I’d tried really hard up to that point to avoid spoilers but at that point I broke and started looking things up on the wiki so I could try to make some sense of it. That was when I found out my mistake, but I was so drawn in at that point that I couldn’t NOT finish it so I just buckled down and did my best listening, and dove IMMEDIATELY into GtN when I finished.
I honestly think the first part of the book might have made a little more sense with my blind read, just because I had absolutely no context for who Harrow was, and I wasn’t filled with the burning anxiety and fear of “oh God what happened to Gideon” that inevitably would have followed the proper reading order. That being said, the emotional impact was WAY more rewarding with the proper context.
Long story short, I have now learned that when consuming audiobooks I need to be triple extra sure that I’m doing it in the right order.