I am a daughter of Lethe, and the wolves are at the door.

I had seen Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo around bookstagram, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. Until someone mentioned magic. Magic is my catnip. How had I missed this?! I had been living under a rock, apparently.

I hopped over to libro.fm and added it to my cart. I have credits built up for just this kind of impulsive download. Ninth House did not disappoint. It is, in fact, one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in a very long time.* It’s gritty. It’s honest. It’s driven by a raw, rough, and dirty kind of magic–where stock market predictions are divined through human intestines and magical drugs can force compliance–without limits.

Alex Stern, the story’s protagonist, is plucked from the shady underbelly of Los Angeles and dropped into Yale’s world of privilege and power. She is recruited by Lethe, the “Ninth House” that oversees the other eight “Houses of the Veil,” the secret societies of Yale, each endowed with its own unique kind of magic. But Alex is not typical Lethe material. She’s different. She isn’t accomplished or academic. She’s a high school drop out, a recovering drug addict, and a victim. But she’s also a survivor. Oh, and she can see ghosts.

Alex works hard to settle into her new life at Yale, under the supervision of Darlington, her guide in this new world of the occult. But one night, he disappears, and Alex is left alone, with an incomplete understanding of the magic she’s supposed to be shepherding. Then a murder rocks the town of New Haven, and she is drawn into the mystery–which will take her to dark and dangerous places, drawn in by insidious forces she can’t begin to understand.

Ninth House is not an easy book to read. The writing is atmospheric, and the system of magic compelling, but the violence throughout the narrative is pervasive and intense. I found myself sucked in by the story, but if I paused to visualize what was happening (or had happened), the actual violence of the events was horrific. It’s a difficult, heavy read. Additionally, this is not a fast-paced book. There’s a lot of meandering, and the narrative is set up as a series of flash-backs and flash-forwards–between the fall semester and the spring semester, before Darlington disappears, and after.

There are periods of intense action; there are lulls. And there is necessarily quite a bit of exposition about the unique magics involved and Alex’s personal history. Setting up a new world can take quite a bit of time and effort, even a world grounded in our own, and I can’t wait to see how the series evolves over time.

Personally, I loved how Bardugo tied together all these small details together to create such a complete picture of Alex and her character. She isn’t naturally strong, brave, or loyal. She’s a survivor, yes, but she’s been irrevocably changed by what she’s experienced. She’s been damaged, broken, and abandoned, and she can’t just emerge from all of that without scars. I think that’s what I liked most about her. Her scars, her doubts, her skepticism and insecurities–those are the things that make her human, and her growth from the beginning to the end reveals the tenacity of her spirit.

Bottom line: I thought it was utterly fascinating. I loved it. This was my first exposure to Leigh Bardugo, but I’d say her transition from YA to adult fantasy was a roaring success.

I am aware, however, Ninth House isn’t the book for everyone. Be sure to check out the entire catalogue of trigger warnings at the end of this post because there are multiple issues in the book that could be problematic depending on the reader.

TW: rape (of a minor), sexual assault, suicide, drug use, overdose, murder, intense violence, mutilation, PTSD, gore, possession. (This would definitely be rated “R” if it were a movie. And they’d have to cut parts of it to achieve an “R.”)

*Obviously I’m making a distinction here between fantasy and high fantasy. Throne of Glass 4eva!

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.