Ninth House

Trigger warning for sexual assault

Alex Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. A dropout and the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved crime – the last thing she wants is to cause trouble. Not when Yale was supposed to be her fresh start. But a free ride to one of the world’s most prestigious universities was bound to come with a catch.

Alex has been tasked with monitoring the mysterious activities of Yale’s secret societies – societies that have yielded some of the most famous and influential people in the world. Now there’s a dead girl on campus and Alex seems to be the only person who won’t accept the neat answer the police and campus administration have come up with for her murder.

Because Alex knows the secret societies are far more sinister and extraordinary than anyone ever imagined. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living…

What if you were tormented by something only you could see? Something that could harm you or humiliate you at any moment? Something you could never explain to anyone, because nobody would ever believe it anyway?

That’s what Alex Stern has grown up dealing with on a daily basis – since the ghosts arrived. They haunt the streets, bars and public bathrooms of Alex’s days, visible only to her. Some of them just want to talk – others have darker, more violent intentions.

It’s her burden to bear alone until one day she is plucked  from the hospital bed she found herself handcuffed to and invited to become the new Dante of Lethe House, an ancient organisation at Yale University tasked with keeping the secret societies in hand, lest their magic get out of control.

Magic?

Yep.

With that, Alex is thrust into a world where finally some things start to make sense – and others become murkier than they have ever been.

I adore Leigh Bardugo, and because I will automatically buy anything she puts out, I actually had no idea what I was stepping into with Ninth House – aside from the fact there was a bit of murder.

(There’s actually quite a lot of murder)

Suffice to say I’m in love, I need the sequel like, yesterday and this world consumed me in the unique way hers tend to do.

A story about magic, murder, loneliness, lost causes and the fraught and particular manifestations of social class at institutions like Yale, the narrative of Ninth House is split in a before and after style – with some cataclysmic and as yet unknown-to-us event at its core. The novel is divided by narrative perspective as well, which won’t come as a surprise to any of Leigh’s regular readers. The dual narrative of Alex and her Virgil (kind of like the chief inspector to her sergeant/ Dante), Darlington, works to tell the two converging timelines of this extraordinary novel. They also make for the perfect unlikely team (my favourite kind of team) – him, a once rich kid living in the remains of a crumbling mansion, her, as Darlington describes, “a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he did.”

I ship it, obviously.

I loved how Leigh weaved a conversation about wealth, privilege and the damage wrought by institutions like Yale into this story of ghosts and magic. That the mostly rich, mostly white kids of Yale pluck homeless people and isolated patients from psychiatric wards to perform magical rituals on, and that the death of a local – town rather than student – a druggie girl probably murdered by her equally druggie boyfriend gets quickly swept into the category of No One Cares aren’t incidental things. It’s no accident that the magic that plagued Alex her entire life until someone finally deigned to explain it to her is hoarded at places like Yale, and taught only to the people who can afford to go there. It’s a book about magic, yes, but it’s also a book about power and the unequal distribution of it. As Alex travels further down the rabbit hole of the whodunit she uncovers countless examples of these rich kids doing damage with impunity under the certainty that the institution and their own privilege will protect them.

Because they always had until Alex – not rich, not white, at the institution but not of it – came along to give the thing a much needed shake up.

I continue to be so impressed by everything Leigh Bardugo puts out, and the nuance, complexity and downright entertainment value of Ninth House comes close to knocking Six of Crows off the top spot of my Bardugo list of favourites.