fantasy
Alex is down on her luck, almost killed in a drug bust, when
she is gifted with the opportunity to attend Yale University. Why? Because she
can see ghosts and Yale happens to have several (eight, to be exact) groups of
the occult functioning on campus. Her ability will help the Lethe (the ninth)
House control the potential disasters that could occur during the other groups’
various shocking activities. But the
person teaching her the ropes in her new role has disappeared.
Yes, really. The reader is supposed to believe that
suspicious, criminal activities involving the dead are taking place at Yale and
that the members of these groups are successful members of public society who
are benefiting from these activities.
So, right off, Leigh Bardugo did not do a great job of making the
setting in Ninth House very believable for me. I
decided to go with it for the sake of potential future story enjoyment. It was a struggle at times to keep reading
since it gets quite convoluted and character/group-heavy in the middle. Much of the time, it was difficult to
understand what, exactly, was happening.
The only character I really cared anything about was the
missing person. I kept reading only to find out what happened to Darlington. Alex’s
misgivings about a murdered girl’s death never really seemed logically related enough
to warrant Alex’s need to investigate. And since the whole story is built
around that investigation it just felt forced by the author. It didn’t work for me. While I have had mixed feelings about the
other Bardugo novels I’ve read, this one was a completely different novel from
her others (and, really, from any other novel I’ve read) so I give her credit
for stepping out of her comfort zone and trying to be creative. However, the bumpy
effort seemed huge for little reward. This novel won the 2019 Goodreads Award
for Fantasy (which is the reason I wanted to read it) and I have to
resoundingly disagree with that achievement. Needless to say, I won’t be
reading any more novels in this series.
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