Reviews with content warning for Domestic abuse - Ninth House

Yum yum yum I love how polarizing this book is. For me, 4.75 stars rounded up. I had a lot of fun.

Starting with cons: Due to the setting at Yale, this book runs the high risk of making its readers feel dumb sometimes. Leigh Bardugo went to Yale for undergrad, was in Wolf's Head, and also researched the h e l l out of Yale's history to make a cohesive, believable backstory. The depth of information fell flat to me as someone who doesn't care about the architecture and alumni of Ivy Leagues. It was a good plot device to show Darlington's intelligence, but occasionally read as, "Look at how much I thought this out and how smart I am!" She toes the line between knowing how grating academics can be and becoming an insufferable know-it-all herself (I understand this bc I am a huge nerd, currently in grad school, and can be academically insufferable). There are probably a ton of references I didn't understand (I'm sure some of it was written for English buffs and Yale students). This makes the book a bit too long, imo. Also, the chapters skip around in time and I don't think that was necessary, though it wasn't too hard to follow.

To be fair, Bardugo's world building ability is unbelievable, and I thought all of her main characters were unique, real, and multifaceted.

Pros: Pretty much everything else. Fun magic system, spooky dark academia, ghosts, sentient houses, whodunit, powerful misfits, revenge, a bi (?) female lead, extremely developed world, and a twisty-turny plot.

Important to note - this book is DARK. Like, graphically dark, and sometimes very gross, and often sad. Check the TWs/CWs.

Leigh Bardugo is an excellent writer and I highly recommend this if you like second chances, dark academia, and magical murder mysteries. It feels like this book was set up to knock the next one out of the park - I can't wait to start the sequel!

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andlovetoowillruinus's review against another edition

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4.0

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blue_skye's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No

2.0

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amandannolan's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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slowry44's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I really like the characters, the writing and the world building, but this book would not let up on the abuse, SA, and constant bleak/grim violence against its characters. The tone is occasionally unbearable to the point of sometimes skipping large chunks of text that are just the author describing the particular manner in which a character is being brutalized this chapter. The magic system is really cool and the creativity in the world design is spectacular. I am glad I got through it cause I quite liked the ending and the answers it brought, but fuck was it a dark and dreary trudge to get there.

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rotidoti's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Only reason it's not a 5/5 is because it is just a little bit too confusing at the start. But the story slowly explains itself to you in a really fascinating manner of flashbacks and the present.

There's so many twists it was hard to put down once I got into it. I was recommended this by my mom and I absolutely loved every bit.

The characters are so wonderfully flawed in a way that is so human I thought it was a real life story at times. Fantastic read!!

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crybabybea's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

There are three reasons I love Leigh Bardugo so much:

Her sentence craft is beautiful. She knows when to make emotions punch. She knows how to paint scenes. She knows how to include literary devices that feel inentional and powerful. She has soo many quotable moments in all of her books. She's even good at writing quippy dialogue which I think is something many authors struggle with.
Her characters are intensely loveable as much as they are hateable.
When her plots get rolling, they get rolling. They feel like a rollercoaster that never stops, with reveal after jaw-dropping reveal. By the time you reach the conclusion, you want to snap the book shut and start all over so you can see all the things you missed.

This book... did not hold up to those standards for me. I felt like her writing seriously declined here. There were a lot of issues I had with this book that made it hard for me to rate it as high as I wanted to. I think I would have rated it lower (or maybe even DNF'd?) had it been written by a less competent author. The issues this book suffered from really reminded me of Babel. That is not a compliment.

I felt like I got the point of what Bardugo was going for here. And it fit really well within the dark academia theme. The secret societies, the allure and danger of power and fitting in with the crowd, the way the powerful see certain groups as disposable. I really did see what she was going for. But I didn't feel like she pushed it far enough. I felt like she relied on trying to make things arbitrarily "darker", leaning into horror tropes that didn't work out well for the story she was trying to tell. And every bit of it fell flat for me, especially knowing what she is capable of as a writer.

I would say this book doesn't pick up until around 30-40%, and even then, the plot unfolds slowly until the last four chapters where everything is revealed. I think this writing worked out in Six of Crows, because the tension was constantly being poked and prodded as you followed the POVs of the different characters. Here, we have mainly one POV that switches between timelines in the form of flashbacks. Which again, would have worked had it not been for the weird plotting. Those two things just did not mix well together. I was also really surprised to see how the POV switching was poorly executed, considering the masterful way she juggled six POVs in Six of Crows. Here, both of our POVs use the same narrative voice, and it would have been unclear who was narrating if they didn't point it out themselves.

The plot was also dragged down by Bardugo's tendency to info-dump world-building and exposition. There were pages of narration and explanations of things like architecture, the campus layout, what characters were wearing, that got to be incredibly boring. It also got in the way of connecting with the characters. The only dialogue we got between Alex and Darlington were dumps of exposition and explanations about the different secret societies at Yale. So by the end we are meant to care about this character who I simply could not care less about because we barely got to see him. His few POVs were not enough to make me invested in his character in any way.

Alex herself was okay as a character but I felt like Bardugo's messaging got lost with her. Her motives weren't clear, and I didn't feel like she experienced any growth or actual hardship through her journey here. I liked her manipulative tendencies, but I felt like they didn't have any actual impact on the plot. I thought Alex should have a lot more agency, but she spends most of the book reacting to the things that happen around her and she gets saved many times by other characters. I also wanted to see her struggle a bit more. She doesn't struggle with her addiction at all, or with intimacy after her traumatic experiences, and her status as a biracial Latina from a poor background doesn't seem to affect her ability to fit in at Yale or cause her any issues within Lethe. I just felt she lacked nuance as a character which really disappointed me, because again, this is Leigh Bardugo's massive advantage.

For what it's worth, the reveals at the end were decently satisfying for me. The villain monologues were eye-roll worthy but the final scene was so well-written that I looked past it. Such is the strength of Leigh Bardugo. So I won't give up on this series because I love the author, and I feel like I was given just enough to be interested in the potential.

Content Warnings

peace_love_on_planet_earth's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

If this had been a dark romance there would have been an abundance of content warnings. No it’s not a romance BUT it needed content warnings. I don’t appreciate having the detailed depiction of an SA of a minor come out of no where in a flashback. Warning for others before going into this, this book contains: the SA of a minor (graphic), sexual coercion of a minor, a minor in an abusive “romantic” relationship (graphic), domestic violence involving a minor, a minor abusing drugs and alcohol. When I say minor, I mean a child age 12-15. This had so many triggers for me and I would’ve liked to have been warned. I kept reading because I wanted Alex to receive some kind of validation for what happened to her but it never came. Bardugo also wrote something questionable about survivors which if you’re reading and haven’t healed or something just happened to you then I would find it extremely damaging. I would’ve liked for her friendship with Dawes to develop more but it also didn’t, perhaps in the next one. It was also slow af at the start. This isn’t fiction for some people and it can be extremely damaging.

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