Review: Ninth House

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This latest from Leigh Bardugo, her first new adult book...well, really, can we call King of Scars an actual YA novel? No, honestly, we can't. But it's pretty clear that as dark as that book could have been, Bardugo was saving her darkest for the back half of this year, a book that's most certainly not PG-13 in its content. Beware all the trigger warnings - there's plenty of violence to be had in this book, of satanic, sexual, sanguine, and even shitty natures. Which makes it make sense that Stephen King and Joe Hill gave it their seals of approval.


Ninth House is unremitting in its darkness as it presents an alternate Yale where all the secret societies are secret for a reason: they're houses of occult magic, often used for research because it's a college and all, but some of that research is being perverted by lust and hunger for power - as usually happens when too many rich guys are thrown into the mix. But where the book is dark, and even our protagonist Alex Stern is perhaps the most anti-heroic of all Bardugo protagonists to date (and a better one than Zoya for sure, because Zoya was way too obvious a Creator's Pet), Alex still represents a certain light, the fight for what's right and how to save others from suffering the sorts of dark fates which she's had to survive. Plus, as a very nice touch, Bardugo draws on her own Sephardic background, giving Alex a lot of memories of haunting Ladino songs from her childhood - songs that I'm pretty sure might be the ones Bardugo says in the acknowledgments that her mother sang to her.

I'm not sure how many books Bardugo has planned in this series - probably two? That's still the trend these days, it seems. But after the cliffhanger on this one, for sure a more enthusiasm-making one than the absolutely angry-making one from King of Scars, I'll be waiting for the second book pretty eagerly!

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