Ninth House Book Review

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

From Goodreads: 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.

Hey lovelies, and welcome to another adult fantasy book review.

Before I get into this one, I want to say that, although there are no official CWs for Ninth House [at least as far as I can see on my edition] there is quite a lengthy list of trigger warnings. A Cup of Wonderland wrote an amazing post about it [which you can check out here ] but for the purposes of writing this review and wanting people to enter it with all the knowledge, I’m going to borrow the substantial list Vicarious Reader uses in their review [thanks for writing this, Vicarious, it’s a really good and well thought out list that I think hits all of the main points]:

Ninth House CW: drug use, overdose, self harm, sexual assault, forced drugging, drugged rape, filming and distribution of rape film, rape of a child, victim blaming, child abandonment, psychological abuse of a child, death, suicide, forced consumption of human waste, blackmail, gore, first person victim’s account of stabbing, suffocation and drowning, torture.

There may be a few that I have missed out, so please just be careful going into this one.

Okay, now that we’ve got that all out of the way, let’s talk about the actual book.

I have to preface this by saying I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Bardugo’s first venture into adult fantasy fiction. We’ve gotten a lot of hype for this book, as well as a lot of confusion and a whole load of people trying to claim it is YA [I’m planning on writing a whole article about this soon] and I think this has caused some issues for people going into the novel.

So it was quite strange actually holding the book in my hands for the first time. I know I opted for the special Waterstones edition, but my god it is pretty. The snake on the cover is so on theme for this novel, and the naked cover is somehow even more gorgeous. It has a compass on it [which I can’t really quite connect with the novel itself but looks amazing] and the snake pattern spine is to die for.

It was also a book that drew me in very quickly. I got a lot of The Secret History vibes from this one. It does feel very distinct from Leigh’s YA novels, both in the writing style and the general highbrow-y ness of the language. I’m not in any way saying that YA can’t use highbrow language, but I feel like Bardugo really pushed it in order to reinforce the Yale setting of the novel. Admittedly, I was a little confused for the first few pages of Ninth House, as it kind of drops you right in the middle of a ritual by one of the secret societies, and it uses a lot of terms which err on the side of jargon. It took a while to actually comprehend what was going on, but again this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The writing was gripping, and I adored the creepy fall vibes I got from it, particularly as I read sections of it on my own uni campus.

It was also fairly easy to get into Alex’s head. I thought she was a great protagonist and her voice was very distinct. Her story is revealed bit by bit, and it was great to see tiny glimpses of her as the novel moved along. She was also very sympathetic and a likeable character. Even at the start, when she’s struggling to keep up with the stress of academia, I instantly felt like I understood her character. Uni is hard, and as someone who has seen what academic stress can do to people, it was something that really connected me to her. Darcy was also someone who felt very realistic to me, and I have met a fair amount of Darlingtons in my time, enough to know that Leigh Bardugo has hit the nail precisely on the head with that one.

Overall, I thought the pacing of the novel was pretty good. There was the odd moment that lagged, but I never wanted to put the book down for too long, which is a sign that it was always quite gripping. The descriptions were lush and dark and I lived for the glimpses of Yale’s famous campus. However, it is clear that Leigh’s strength is definitely in the dialogue. There were so many quippy, dry and sarcastic one liners and I was living for it. It added so much to the characters’ voices, and it just felt very Bardugo. There’s something to be said for how much this adds to the story’s readability, and the overall pace.

There were some less than stellar moments, of course. I did feel like there was a lot going on in this book. It’s a fantasy novel, but also a dark academia book, with a murder mystery element thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot to balance here, and I think part of the problem is that some readers will go into this book expecting one thing and getting another. There’s a bit too much going on and it’s unlikely that all the elements will please everyone. Additionally, there’s a lot of moments where things aren’t really explained. The ending was a touch confusing, and I do feel like the book kinda needed a second read to make sense of some of what was going on. The worldbuilding was fascinating, bordering on fantastic at times, but again I feel like there will be some people who pick it up wanting a fantasy book and getting a bunch of academic jargon, just as there will be some people anticipating a dark academia book and getting a load of backstory about ghosts. I’m not saying that these things can’t go together [trust me, I’m actually currently writing a book with a similar premise] but I do think maybe there were moments when we needed the author to give us a bit more of a clue and maybe slow the pace a touch to explain what was going on, or why something was important.

I will say, I think Bardugo does a great job of trying to mesh these elements together. One of the issues I have with murder mysteries is that sometimes they can go badly wrong. Ever read a murder thriller book where it turns out the killer was the guy who very briefly appeared on one page to serve the main characters coffee in chapter 3 and was never seen again until the resolution? Right. Meshing fantasy and murder mystery elements together can be especially dangerous, since it’s so easy to rely on the magical MacGuffin to help explain how the evidence ties together. Thankfully, Bardugo evades this trap. The clues are well hidden, but never so buried that the conclusion to that mystery doesn’t make sense or feels like a disappointment. It also manages to avoid some of the cliches of these genres too.

Overall, I’d give Ninth House:

 

 

 

 

 

I think it’s a very solid first adult novel, and while there’s room for improvement going into the second book, I liked this one a lot. It’s yet another great recommendation for anyone looking for a creepy, atmospheric and dark autumn book. Of course, the content warnings might mean it isn’t appropriate for everyone [and those thinking of picking it up as a gift to a twelve or thirteen year old who loved Bardugo’s YA books should absolutely think twice about that] but I do think, if you’re able to sit through some of the darker elements of the novel, it’s a rewarding experience.

Has anyone else read this book already or plans to? What do you all think of it? Let me know in the comment section down below ❤