Ninth House

I don't know why, but I could not escape the Buffy vibes.

Not that Alex Stern was running around doing somersaults over tombstones and saying clever one-liners. Rather, the bookishness mixed with the arcane magic mixed with the attitude all felt like a (very) grown-up Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alex Stern, after mysteriously surviving a massacre of all her friends and one or two enemies, is plucked out of drug addiction and poverty to attend Yale and serve as the new Dante to the house of Lethe. A job she is uniquely qualified for - despite being woefully unqualified for Yale academics - because she can see ghosts. Lethe is the watchdog society - the titular ninth house - to the secret societies that deal in arcane magic. “No more dead hobos” is the casual motto, referring to the propensity of privileged and powerful rich kids' tendency to not understand impulse control. And by her first winter, she's dealing with the disappearance of her mentor, Darlington, and the murder of a townie, which Alex becomes increasingly convinced that the society's are involved in.

The story gets pretty windy from there. I am seriously impressed with Bardugo's ability to keep complex plots straight. The pacing is good, the style keeps your eyes glued to the page. There was rarely a time when my mind would wander while reading this (and that's saying something, I have quite the wandering mind). That said, this book is structured a little episodically. For the first half of the book we jump between times and perspectives - Alex and Darlington's - learning their histories, their secrets, until finally we jump into solving the mystery in earnest. It's all interesting - there's magic and drugs and ghosts - but it's easy to put the book down and not pick it up again for a while because the urgency isn't exactly there. It's almost like solving the murder would just be a nice cherry on top of this dark academia cake, but it's not keeping you eating.

There was a lot made of the adult content in this book, particularly the sexual violence. I had one person tell me that they specifically disliked the book because of its focus on the damage that men do to women. I would say that if that's not something you like to read about, then maybe this isn't for you, but generally that's not really my thing either. I think this book processes both the individual and collective trauma that women experience at the hands of men in really satisfying and reflective ways. At no point did I think any of it was unnecessary - this book is about privilege, it's about power, and its about what should be done with those things as opposed to what can.

I like Alex and her grittiness. It's not something that she really wanted for herself - she dove headfirst into drug addiction at 12 years old when she realized it stopped her from seeing ghosts. She racked up years of anger, trauma and violence, and then ended up at Yale where she doesn't exactly try to fit in, but she does at least try to be a version of herself that could have been. She soon realizes that her darker self has a purpose in this new world too, she doesn't have to sacrifice one for the other. Likewise, Darlington is the gentleman, the scholar, the tender heart. He too, goes through a transformation that will take him to a much different part of himself.

This is a super fun book, honestly. It's dark, but Bardugo is good at writing darkness in a way that doesn't drag you down. If you're not as scatterbrained like me, or are not experiencing a period of high stress and distraction (and why in the world would you be experiencing that??) these 45o pages will fly by.