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Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1) by Leigh Bardugo

"A dark and gripping thriller set on the posh and polished campus of Yale University and within the eight Secret Societies. There's more to these houses than famous Alumni, there's magic but it's dangerous and disturbing and Alex Stern, accepted into the House of Lethe, will learn quickly how far people are willing to go when money and power are involved." 

4 Stars

Pros: Darlington and Stern's repartee is amusing, since he's so refined and she's rougher around the edges/Though Stern can be headstrong and a little obnoxious, she is a good person to have an ally/The magic in this story is complicated and elaborate but interesting and unique.  

Cons: Stern is street smart but her unwillingness to trust others gets her into a lot of bad situations/The "I'm the only one who can solve this murder" attitude is kind of overdone/The map at the front of the books is impossibly small, so, whenever Bardugo goes into detail about where Stern is at any given time, it was all lost on me/Though the ending made sense, it was all rather convenient but, hey, it leaves room for a sequel. 

Full Review

Galaxy (Alex) Stern has always had a unique ability. She's able to see ghosts. She calls them the Quiet Ones and she's learned not to tell people what it is she can see. It all comes to a head when she's attacked by a ghost during a school field trip and everyone thinks she's crazy when she tries to explain what happened. 

Alex's life quickly declines after that. She eventually just stops going to school. She starts hanging around with older kids, kids who deal in drugs and make generally bad decisions. But she realizes that when she's with them, when she's high, the Quiet Ones don't bother her as much. And so, she falls into a life of drugs and addiction.  

When she's found unconscious at the scene of a grisly and brutal murder, three men beaten almost beyond recognition with a bat and two others stabbed through the heart, she's sure that when she awakes in the hospital, her life is over. But in a strange twist of fate, she finds a man sitting beside her hospital bed and handing her a golden opportunity. 

He is Elliot Sandow, the Dean of Yale University and he wants to offer her a job. Her unique ability, to see "Grays" lends itself well to the House of Lethe, a House of the Veil at Yale that monitors and regulates the use of magic between the eight ancient houses. Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Manuscript, they all have a different kind of magic that they use and Alex is teamed up with Daniel Tabor Arlington IV, Darlington, who will be the Virgil to her Dante and help lead her through these circles of Hell. 

It's only a few months into her first Semester when everything takes a turn. Darlington disappears, apparently sucked into a portal to God knows where and a girl is found murdered on the Yale Campus. Alex has a bad feeling that it's all somehow connected. She has no idea how far she'll have to go to find answers and the truths that will be revealed on her mission. 

Bardugo's writing style is easy and effortless. The story gets a little convoluted at times but it's fantasy, so suspension of disbelief is a must. And though Alex is crass and rough, she's an amusing foil to Darlington's "gentleman scholar" persona and they make a good team. I'll definitely be picking up Hell Bent ASAP and hope it has the same edge of your seat suspense that Ninth House did. 

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