Sarah O'Connor

“That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible,” (Bardugo 71).

Alex Stern never thought she’d be going to Yale. A recovering addict and lone survivor of an unsolved homicide, Alex is given the second chance to attend Yale on a paid scholarship. But there’s a twist, Yale is home to eight occult secret societies, all of which dabble in magic. Alex has been tasked to join Lethe, the ninth house, that supervises the other societies and makes sure they don’t take their practice in magic too far. But when a girl is found dead with links to four of the eight societies, Alex is determined to find out who killed the girl why they’re trying to keep it a secret.

I’ve heard so much about Ninth House and I just don’t get the hype. I think Urban Fantasy is a very cool subgenre of Fantasy and I’d love to find more books that dabble in the subject matter, but Ninth House just doesn’t deliver. It has the promise of it with secret magical societies at Yale, but readers are literally thrown into the world with little to no explanation on how magic, works or the different societies. There’s an index in the back that list the eight different houses, their mottos and specialties as well as alumni (which is hilarious) but I thought this would have fit much better at the beginning of the book rather than at the end. It’s an intriguing setting, but I needed a lot more explanation to fully immerse myself in it.

I haven’t read any of Leigh Bardugo’s works before but I know this was her first foray into adult fantasy and it feels like it. Ninth House has all the markings of a YA novel: protagonist that goes by a nickname for a longer quirkier name (Galaxy, ugh), protagonist finds themselves offered into a mysterious world/society because they are “special,” something bad that happens that protagonist is the only one clever enough to solve, protagonist is “not like other girls” and is very witty and always knows what to say. Use these tropes and make the characters eighteen plus and I guess you can call it Adult Fantasy, I guess.

Character-wise I LOVED Darlington. Fingers crossed things work out in Hell Bent. Plotwise I enjoyed the back and forth between past and present, I thought it was an interesting way to tell the story and the past followed Darlington, so obviously I preferred that. But so much happened so quickly in the ending, it felt like a bit of a mess of revelations. Too many things tied up oh so conveniently.

An intriguing idea, but I just didn’t get it. But I own an ARC of Hell Bent so I guess I’m reading this series too. Let’s see if the next one holds my interest any better than Ninth House!

Publication: October 8 2019
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Pages: 461 (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Urban Fantasy
My Rating: ⛤⛤
Summary:

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.