Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

 

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is about an outsider, Galaxy "Alex" Stern, who finds herself involved in the mystical and magical secret societies of Yale in New Haven.  Along the way, her mentor disappears, she's stabbed and beaten, hell hounds and ghosts abound, and we learn about magical rites and locuses (loci?) of magical power.  

I've historically enjoyed Bardugo's books very much. The duology of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom kept me from losing my mind early in the pandemic. I thought that Bardugo did a great job of character development and I liked the heist elements of the duology.

This book, though, was not exactly what I wanted to be reading. Alex is a dark character, New Haven is a dark place, and the magic explored here wasn't fun "repel rain from your eyeglasses" Harry Potter magic, but focused more on obtaining power, influence, and money. That may be your jam, but it's really not mine. 

On one hand, this book deals with a lot of the same dark issues that Six of Crows did - there's trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, not to mention drug use and questionable uses of consent.  (There's also an utterly revolting scene in which a man is forced to eat something...repulsive that just came out of the middle of nowhere.)  But while Six of Crows was set in a fantasy world and there was something metaphorical about how these issues were dealt with, this was just a dark book set in our world and there was nothing metaphorical at all about the hopelessness that we were left with at the end of the book.

Alex's past is horrific.  Her solutions to problems, while understandable, are still morally wrong.  She's an anti-heroine and the same way I stopped watching Breaking Bad the second Walter White allowed someone to die who he could have helped, I struggled to finish this book knowing that I would never forget about her actions.  Again, I think that the way she's dealing with her past trauma is understandable, but it doesn't make her someone to root for. I'm certainly not going to be picking up the second book in the series when it comes out. 

Things I Bookmarked:

"Death waits on black wings and we stand hoplite, hussar, dragoon." (page 58)

Avgolemono: A classic Greek sauce of chicken broth, egg yolks, and lemon juice (page 94)

"Suffocating beneath a pile of books seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant." (page 117)

"No one drew their curtains; light and heat and good fortune spilled out into the dark as if these foolish people didn't know what such bounty might attract, as if they'd left these shining doorways open for any hungry girl to walk through." (page 147)