Reviews with content warning for Racism - Ninth House

The racism against POC people in this book it's astonishing—despite whatever good intentions could lay behind the plot.
Dark academia it's more than a setting, it's a critic toward elitism inside intellectual and cultural settings.
This book isn't a critic. To me, it's a fantasy story about a Yale graduated where "what if Yale's secret societies had dark magical powers, with very edgy characters as protagonists?"
And this is a problem that I've seen multiple times with fairly successful YA authhors: to have an adult book does NOT mean "watch how many trigger warnings I can sum up into this bad boy." (Trigger warnings that originally published weren't included in the ARCS giveaways).
The multiple heavy-topic themes are just thrown in for shock value, without any care to dive deeper in the consequences that would give respect to actual victims.
Needless to say, to read this as a Latina was so deeply hurtful I had a panic attack that made me stop reading with care and just spiteful sweeping across pages to read the ending.
Alex could've just been Jewish, coming from poverty, and NOTHING would've changed in the plot. For her to be ambiguously Latina it's just to justify the bad traits she has, and oh boy she has a LOT.

Bad at school
Enters Yale as a replacement, because she could have never entered by her own merits.
Too dumb to learn Latin.
Refer herself as "shit that sticks".
Drug addict.
And the root? All because her (Latino) father abandoned her.

Please. Spit in my face closer, Bardugo.
All the themes in this book just make up space of nonsense.

Because how it is possible that a book criticizing misogyny

has the big baddie as a WOMAN???

or that the obvious main love interest it's your stereotypical gloomy, rich, white boy? That discovers his attraction toward Alex

through a rape scene???

That includes a revenge scene reminding of "Spit in my grave" where Alex

makes the rapist eat his own excrement while she records a video JUST to show it to her raped friend and that just magically cures any of her traumas??

This is wild, man.
Plot-related aside, this book it's boring up the last third.
Bardugo it's an established author and it's shows: because to waste half the book in narrating things that already happened and that the readers are already aware of? Unbelievable.
Here the murder it's a setting to info-dump about the characters. A rather annoying strategy I've seen Bardugo has started to settle comfortably in since King of Scars after the success of Six of Crows.
The problem? I don't care for any of the characters in Ninth House. They're not charming, or witty, or funny. I don't care about their tragic backstories (TM).
Her writing it's very good, but here it feels snobby and over the top. One thing it's to weave the atmosphere and another it's to show off.
Anyway, with this book I end my decade-long relationship of devotion toward Leigh Bardugo's work. Once brilliant and refreshing, now coming crashing down since it's peak with Six of Crows, landing messily with the King of Scars fiasco, and buried into Dante's Inferno with Ninth House.
0.5 stars ⭐️, for "trying".

Content Warnings

hjb_128's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

eedle_cacleberry's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

jelkebooks's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

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

4.0

I have been excited to read this book ever since it first came out. However, I have been putting of reading this book because I was just kind of intimidated by it. For some reason I thought this book would be a bit dense, and far out of my comfort zone. I am very glad I finally pushed through that intimidation though because this book was not that, and in the end I really loved this one.
It did take me a little to get into this book. We just get thrown into this world, and the different societies can be a little confusing to navigate. At the start the overall story of this book is also a bit unclear. However, once that came into focus I could not put this book down. It was just such a compelling read, and I was very curious to see how this mystery would unfold. Ultimately there ended being a couple of things going on, and I honestly thought some of these things might be wider series things. However, the ending of this book brilliantly waved them all together. It just all worked together really well. I predicted some parts of it but the way it all blended together truly blew my mind.
I also absolutely ADORED Alex as a main character. Her backstory was absolutely brutal, but also quite interesting. I feel like it gave her a very unique perspective within this world, and I adore how she fought for what she believed in throughout this book, even when no one else would join her. She's just such a good main character, in my opinion and I loved following her. The side characters aren't as well developed, mainly because they also don't have a lot of page time yet. However, there are some that I feel like are going to play a bigger part in the overall series and I am extremely excited to get to know them better.
The only reason this wasn't a five star for me was because I just still feel like I don't fully get how the magic nor the secret societies work. I feel like we didn't really get enough explenations for that. It still feels so vague to me. We definitely knew enough to be able to follow the main story of this book, but there were still so many aspects to the magic system that I truly do not understand, and therefore I just felt a bit lost.

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