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Synopsis:
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.
Review:
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo is the first in the Alex Stern series, a character who has been selected to be a student at Yale University to also work as part of their team of people who oversee the different houses while they use their magic and complete rituals. Alex is a high school dropout and recovering drug addict who is found after she flees a house where everyone that she lived with and knew are murdered and is found on the street naked and delirious. When Alex is in the hospital, Yale comes to recruit her, because they know. For centuries, New Haven and Yale University has been a hub of paranormal activity and magical powers. The eight houses who are sanctioned to do rituals sit on weak points between this world and the magic world. This means many people are doing weird stuff and it is up to Alex Stern and the Lethe House to make sure none of this goes sideways. Enter the murder of a girl on a Thursday night when all of the rituals are being done around campus. Since the victim is not a student or someone important, her murder is seen as a simple case of a boyfriend stabbing his girlfriend to death. Alex sees things differently, is bothered by the whole murder and excuse, maybe because she felt something weird happen at the same the the girl was being killed and maybe she sees a little bit of herself in the dead girl (both underestimated and seen as inferior to those around them). She cannot stop thinking about it and cannot stop investigating.
Part of Ninth House is setting up a world of magic and mayhem, where different magic houses are doing things they probably should not be doing. What could possibly go wrong when we give young people, many of them without fully developed frontal lobes, access to magic powerful enough to have someone visit the underworld or someone to lose all of their inhibitions or the abilities to make super powerful drugs? Even with Lethe House trying to keep track of all of this, there is no doubt that most of the magic done on campus is not sanctioned and not every ritual is done in good faith. The biggest part of Ninth House is about the characters and developing them in a slow and steady way so that the reader will want to come back for the next book in the series. There is no illusion that this is planned as the beginning of a book series, and from the very beginning this book is doing a lot of heavy lifting to establish the world and the major players. I like all of the characters at Lethe House. I enjoy the rawness of Alex Stern, how she does not fit into the societies that she has been brought into, societies that have been established through the centuries. She does not always follow the politeness or manners that are expected of her as a member of Lethe House. Her time before Yale University when she lived off of her wits and instincts really does her favors in this setting because she can surprise many of the entitled kids that are her peers but underestimate her. She is always thinking about the final outcome of any situation before she does it, particularly if there will be repercussions for stepping outside of the normal boundaries. She believes she can get away with many of the corners she cuts and the rules that she breaks because everyone has something they want to keep hidden. I also like the backstory of Darlington, the person who is supposed to be training Alex but disappeared before the book begins. He is thought to be stuck between the living world and the magic world, and they have to wait for the new moon to get him back. I even like Dawes, the research assistant who is irritated by Stern and reluctantly helps her when all she wants to do is listen to her headphones and work on her laptop. The other characters are interesting enough. Some of the college students are a little cliche, but they are also vehicles for the Lethe house characters more than having their own narrative. In the end, Bardugo does spend time and effort to give the major characters backstories and histories that make them unique but believable.
The most minor part of this novel is the actual plot, the investigation of the dead girl but also trying to get Darlington to return home. The plot is good enough, interesting and keeps the book moving, but it is also kind of like the college kids: a vehicle for the main characters and world structure to become well established for the next book. Bardugo’s interest is definitely more about the characters and the magic tricks than actually the plot. Sure it all ties together nicely, and the storytelling and plot are well done, but the focus on the murder investigation seems to be a little soft compared to the amount of time spent on building the world.
Ninth House is interesting and I do like fiction that take place on college campuses. There is a great deal of thought and skill used to the build a version of Yale University that runs on secret societies using magic for their own gains but is still believable as a university. The characters of Lethe House are strong enough to want to read the next book about them. There are many moments where I think that Ninth House does some unique and wonderful things, but this is also a novel that really spends more time with character development and world building over substance, and sometimes it feels like more of a setup for books to come than a book that does much on it’s own. I will be reading the next in the series though. I need to know what happens next, so I guess that means Ninth House does the job.
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