A review by bookishfabledfiction
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

adventurous dark mysterious reflective 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? It's complicated

4.5

This book is right up my alley. I really enjoyed it and would have given it 4.5/5 ⭐️ had it not been for the last chapter or so. I didn't (and still don't) quite understand
how Darlington had become a demon and, more importantly, how Alex had arrived at this conclusion.
It felt like Bardugo was trying maybe a bit too hard to leave an opening for a sequel (which has been published, of course). I believe I would've liked the story better had it ended without
Darlington surviving and becoming a demon (or something??).
That being said, I still plan on reading the next book in the series.
Otherwise, it's a really interesting story with a couple of mysteries, multi-faceted characters, and a solid magic system. I particularly like how Bardugo incorporated her fictional world within the real-life New Haven/Yale campus. She played off Yale's real-world secret societies quite well. Bardugo also made it difficult to predict the resolution.
Would recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy and mysteries.

Quotes:

He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.

Death words could be anything, really, as long as they spoke of the things Grays feared most—the finality of passing, a life without legacy, the emptiness of the hereafter.

Peace was like any high. It couldn’t last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever. Only two things kept you safe: money and power.

...harmless people high on nothing more than their own pretensions.

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