Leigh Bardugho: Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) | Lara
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.
The mesmerizing adult debut from #1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo.
“Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.”
In a dark and twisted world of ghosts and Societies, there is a very fine line between hunting and being prey. Alex Stern could see the souls of the dead for as long as she can remember, but there is only so much she can do about it when she discovers they can touch her. They weren’t supposed to do that, were they? And for that matter, who would believe a scared twelve-year-old about seeing ghosts – it’s much easier to proclaim her weird and throw her on the outlines. Despite all her mother’s desperate efforts to get her in line, Alex ended up in circles of gang drug-abusing boyfriends, waiting for nothing more than the days to pass by. Well, until she was found as the only survivor of multiple bloody homicides in her apartment, and was offered a study in one of the most prestigious colleges in the country and job at the House of Lethe. As it turns out, she is not alone. Soon she is pulled in a mess of magic and Societies who use it, but her job is to be there and see that nothing goes wrong.
I don’t know how many times I will say this but I don’t think it’ll ever be enough – Leigh Bardugho is a mastermind when it comes to writing. I don’t think I’ve ever read her book that hasn’t captured my attention and never let go of it. The all-consuming narrative and complex characters make it impossible to let go of this book, as well as the ring of events that keep tightening around the plot until the most terrifying secrets of Alex’s past are revealed. This is a dark book, with fucked up characters and gruesome things – but that’s what we all came here for, didn’t we? Ninth House will shock you and make you believe in the magic of the souls, giving you just enough to hold on to before taking it all from your grasp. The way Bardugho pieced this story bit by bit until it all came together left me trembling by the end of it.
“Alex didn’t have money. But she did have power. She’d been afraid of it, afraid of staring directly at that blood-soaked night. Afraid she’d feel regret or shame, of saying goodbye to Hellie all over again. But when she’d finally looked? Let herself remember? Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled in her, because she felt only a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.”
Ninth House is told from the third perspective of Yale student Alex Stern, and her narrative closes up two timelines, one retrospective and one in the present until they overlap in the moment of Darlington’s disappearance. The conceptualization and pacing of the plot vaguely reminded me of the way Schwab’s Villains series was written – readers are thrown in medias res with a thousand question marks hovering over their head until the pieces finally start making sense and realization kicks, puzzle becoming an ominous picture of everything gone wrong to bring the characters to that point.
“I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.”
I’m don’t want to exaggerate, but I’d die for most of Bardugho’s character, especially if they have anything to do with gangs and underworld. Exploring the depths of these characters’ pasts and motives is a twisted and lightless journey, with a lot of pain and unwashed blood. Alex and Darlington work their strengths around loads of trauma and abuse, from PTSD to fighting abuse and abandonment as children, overcoming drug abuse and even murder. The world has never been kind to them and has given them nothing but nightmares, but they won’t be broken so easily. They got back up every time, again and again until no one could bring them down anymore. Alex is so badass and risks all to do what she thinks is right even though it may cost her anything. She was done with powerful men that got away with everything and injustice that let them kill girls who couldn’t defend themselves.
“But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”
I loved both of them so much, even though Darlington doesn’t even make an appearance, but oh he will xd
“He needed her and she needed him. That was how most disasters began.”
CW: sexual abuse, rape, child abuse, child abandonment, murder, drug abuse
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