#Review - Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo #Thrillers / #Supernatural

Series: Alex Stern # 1
Format: Hardcover,480 pages
Release Date: October 8, 2019
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Source: Library
Genre: Thrillers / Supernatural

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. In fact, by age twenty, 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 prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living. 

Ninth House is the adult fantasy debut novel by author Leigh Bardugo. Bardugo re-imagines the secret societies at Yale to be teaming with dark magic, works of alchemy and the occult. 20 year old Galaxy "Alex" Stern is a HS drop out and a girl who got deep into drugs which ended up with her in a hospital and an offer that she couldn't turn down. Lethe House aka Ninth House, most notably Dean Sandow, promised Alex that if she could help them regulate the magic of the secret societies, she would graduate from Yale without any debt.

She's now a gritty, feisty Yale freshman who takes crap from nobody while also trying to get by as a student. As Lethe House's Dante, Alex keeps an eye on Yale’s 8 secret societies whose practice of magic to manipulate politics, the stock market and more is both chilling and dangerous. What makes her special? She is one of the rare ones able to see ghosts in color called grays. The same grays who have haunting her since an early age. What starts innocently enough, becomes a murder mystery when a Tara Hutchins, a townie, shows up dead on a street corner. When the easy answers don’t satisfy Alex, she realizes how seriously she takes her new job.

Alex's near obsession with finding the girl's murderer causes a series of events that test magic in depths that Alex never thought were imaginable. To make things even more interesting, Alex's mentor, Daniel Arlington, went missing after one of the houses prognostication. Could the two events be connected? If so, which house(s) might be involved? As we are reading the story, Alex gives hints as to what happened in the past that lead up to Daniel's disappearance. Alex's only real allies are a reluctant Pamela Dawes who is a occult grad studies student and Detective Abel Turner who is supposed to be centurion and help Alex whenever she needs the police involved. 

Turner and Alex are more antagonist towards the other than actual allies until she puts together a valid point to investigate. Alex is an instrument of justice, and doesn't care who she ends up stepping over in order to find the truth. I think this book does well to show Alex's induction into the ritualistic, privileged, magical underworld of Yale's secret society network as a member of Lethe, the designated gatekeepers and rule-enforcers of the societies. I think the ending leaves lots of room for exploration of many angles as to what happens next and if Alex can find a way to get Daniel back. 

As an FYI, Leigh is herself a graduate of Yale and a member of one of the campus’s oldest secret societies (which she declines to name). I think this fact gives the story a bit more of a feeling of actually being there in Alex's shoes as she walks the streets of New Haven, and explores the fabled secret houses of Yale which includes some American presidents, and others of Wall Street and others.

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