Trigger warnings: Ninth House is a very dark book and it references multiple accounts of gruesome murders. There's also magic and communing with the dead that sometimes requires people to self-harm.
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.
Review: Ninth House is a book that I have read. Okay, that's a little mean. Ninth House was fine. I understand why people like Alex. She's a smart and interesting character. But I felt like she was the only interesting character. Everyone else just felt like filler and none of them were memorable. This book did take me a surprisingly long amount of time to read, so that might have been part of the problem. But I felt like we were supposed to care about Darlington. I honestly cared so little about him that I forgot his name and had to look it up.
Characters aside, the plot wasn't what I hoped. I knew it would be a dark academia novel, but the magic in Ninth House lost me. It didn't feel like a necessary part of the story which was a bummer. I love to see how characters in academic settings deal with magic, but it didn't work for me. I think my history working in an academic setting took me a bit out of Ninth House too. It sounded like Alex was posing as an undergrad student, and I had a hard time imagining myself as an undergrad or my former student workers could have found time to meddle in supernatural affairs. Yes, I realize Alex priority was the Lethe and not her academic progress. It just seemed weird to me.
Underwhelming story and characters. The story could have ditched the magic and probably been a more enjoyable book.
3 howls
Comments