Ninth House Book Review
Warning: this review contains spoilers. Reader be warned.
Ninth House is a perfect example of mood reading for me. I DNFed this book when I first picked it up more than a year ago. I couldn’t get past the first 30 pages (there certainly is A LOT in those first few pages and it can be quite assaulting on your brain if you aren’t expecting it!) As we slowly creep into the fall season, I've been craving something dark and spooky, something a little gory. Maybe something with ghosts, so I decided to pick this book up again and it was a lot different this time around.
Here’s the premise: Alex Stern is a freshman at Yale with a dark and pretty traumatic past. Instability, drugs, abusive partners were all part of her normal life. After one violent night, she wakes with an offer from a man who works at one of the most prestigious Ivy League institutions in the country: come to Yale on a full ride, work to monitor the actions of the the eight secret societies and try to keep them in line. With all other options looking extremely bleak, Alex takes the deal and soon finds herself in New Haven, Connecticut in the midst of strange and gruesome activities.
The setting of Ninth House is one of my favorite things about this novel. Perfect for fall (or even winter), this book was dark and dreary and very atmospheric. I could imagine myself walking the Yale campus at night, leaves rustling as I walk, seeing the old buildings and the students heading to the library to cram for exams. The town of New Haven was just as much of a character in this novel as anyone else. Bardugo alludes to this many times throughout the novel and this added to my enjoyment. You’ve captured my attention when a non-human being plays a character-like role.
Speaking of characters, I was a bit apathetic about Alex. She didn't seem very special to me and maybe that was the point? She is just an ordinary person with an interesting ability but what leaves me scratching my head is why? Why does she have the ability to see Grays (what Bardugo calls ghosts in this story) when no one else does? I know Bardugo gives us some answers in regards to this question, but I need more! Maybe we will understand more about Alex’s ability in book two. I actually liked the invisible character of Darlington more than Alex. I say he is invisible because he is part of this story but only in flashbacks. At the start of this book, he has mysteriously disappeared. For me, this was one of the most intriguing things about this novel. Bardugo kept me guessing up until the very end about the circumstances surrounding his disapparence. The inclusion of a Gray (ghost) as a character was also interesting. The Bridegroom, New Haven's most notorious and ghoulish ghost, played a pretty important role in this story and it was interesting (and slightly spooky) to see how Alex interacted with this character.
This was one story with multiple mysteries. Not only were we attempting to solve the mystery of Tara Hutchinson’s murder, we were also watching Alex try to figure out what happened with the Bridegroom all those years ago, and what happened to Darlington. On top of that, we’re also trying to figure out what in the world happened to Alex prior to her coming to Yale. Does that sound like a lot? For me, there were parts of this book that lagged and parts that felt too overly stuffed with plot points. The pacing seemed slightly off and I felt pulled in different directions and unable to focus on one mystery thread at a time. This book is not confusing, but it is jam packed with different mysteries. One of my favorite things about this novel was the secret society concept. It felt very similar to a "magic school" setting and the rituals these secret societies practiced were so strange that it was interesting to wonder if any of it could be factual.
“And there was a big difference between things being fair and things being set right.”
Identity seems to play a large role in this story. How others define us, what groups we are a part of, what makes us strong or capable or worthy. Watching Alex struggle through how she identifies herself was powerful.
I really thought I had predicted the ending, and I was correct for part of it, but as I mentioned earlier, this was not a novel with one mystery. So I may have predicted one part of the ending, but I definitely did not guess the others. I thought the ending was mostly satisfying but there is a book two, which means not everything in this book was tied up in a perfect neat bow.
I read Ninth House as a buddy read with my husband. He is also a reader and this book has been on his TBR for awhile. If you’ve never done a buddy read before, I highly recommend it. Find someone who wants to read a book that you also want to read and read it together! You can read it one chapter at a time and then discuss or discuss as you go along. We kind of did the latter. As we read, we asked each other questions and shared theories. At the end, we spent some time breaking down the themes and what we think will happen next.
A book isn’t always right at the time you pick it up. When I first picked up this book, I wasn’t interested at all. I thought it was too weird and it didn’t take me long to put it down. But that doesn’t meant that months, maybe even years later, that it won’t be right. Sometimes books aren't right in a specific moment, that doesn't mean they are never right.
