Ninth House, however, has nothing of the vivid and mordant storylines that made Bardugo's previous books so stunning. One thing about Bardugo-she is really good at fully bringing to life a place most of us can't pretend to know, and she’s already displayed a great gift for plot and world building in her YA Grisha-verse books. I kept asking myself: how it is it that I am not enjoying a book that is so perfectly calculated to be my literary ideal? And here, I think, is the answer. The experience of reading this book, however, does not live up to that premise. Death fucks us all.”Īs I said, an intensely sexy premise. ![]() The societies will always have a comfortable veil of money between them and the rest of the world, but when the deal Alex made falls through, she will once again be powerless.Īlex, however, is a survivor. Now there is a fog creeping along at both of their heels, swallowing their footsteps and erasing their evidence, and when a girl winds up dead and Darlington melts to nothing before Alex’s eyes, the wrongness of Lethe, of Yale, of what they're doing, is inescapable.ĭarlington believed they were safe in Lethe-they were the shepherds, after all-but Alex knew Lethe only bestows the kind of protection that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. However adequate Alex's lies are, Darlington’s gaze, always fastened on her, is a mirror that grants a ruinous glimpse of herself. The problem is, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington sees Alex a little too clearly. They are clearly a matchmaker’s dream.Īlex throws herself at Lethe's offer and the chance to scrub her past clean, even when ordered to follow at Darlington’s heels like an obedient shadow. Galaxy "Alex" Stern trails an army of ghosts that only she can see. To this end, and for reasons you’ll have to find out, Lethe needs someone who can see ghosts. Peering down from a lofty chair at the rest of the societies is House of Lethe, standing guard to ensure that Yale’s unwholesome affairs will not tip everyone into whirling chaos. In Leigh Bardugo’s first offering to the adult genre, Yale University wears claws hidden in a velvet glove, magic doesn't require skill so much as a steady lavishing of grotesqueries, and men in power use their loyalty to underground societies to further their own ambitions-without counting the cost. Ninth House, we can all agree, has a very sexy premise. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. 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. 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. 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. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. 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. Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class.
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