Synopsis:
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.
4 out of 5 stars
*TRIGGER WARNING* This book is littered with explicit content, including themes of sexual assault, rape, drug use and abuse, and suicide (attempted and otherwise). I do not discuss said themes in length in this review, however, if you consider reading the book having read this review, proceed at your own risk.
I had relatively high expectations when I went on to read this book as I had read some of Leigh Bardugo's previous work and had no reservations about Bardugo's ability to impress with her writing and world-building. Not to mention, the promise of a dark academic setting was persuasion enough. In large part, this book is set at Yale University, clearly Leigh Bardugo took writing what she knows (Yale is her alma mater, after all). There were details of the campus and the school's culture that go beyond mere research, details that come with having had the intimate perspective that four years of living in close quarters with it all typically gives you. Interestingly though, Alex Stern (our main character) and Bardugo have more in common than just attending Yale: Alex was recruited by Yale's occult oversight society, the fictitious Ninth House conjured up for the purposes of Bardugo's story. According to an interview she had conducted with NPR, the author was a member of the very real and still-standing Wolf's Head, one of eight other very real and powerful secret societies within the university. I briefly read up on the delicious history of these societies and have gathered that, while they are markedly less involved in the supernatural than was depicted in the Bardugo's story (that is not to say that they do not attempt engage with the world of the supernatural), but are no less powerful. Apparently, such societies are bastions of privilege that garner and deliver on promises of financial as well as social currency, and we get a glimpse of this power in Ninth House. The characters of the book are just as dark as the social spaces they inhabit, which always makes for a fun read in mysteries and thrillers, if you ask me.
It seems slow-burn delivery and withheld disclosure are the orders of the day, because if I had to describe this book in one word it would be, "unyielding". I didn't know what was going on until I was about halfway through the book. It isn't merely the characters' reluctance to divulge more than they let on, it's also as if the narrative voice is just as ready to bear all and that lends to this added flair of mystery: It's a sentiment that isn't universal to mystery/thriller books, but I have experienced this unique mix of frustration and interest in less than a handful of books before.
In my to-read list this year!
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