I mention these warnings for people who may be triggered by this content and also for young people who may have come to this book from Bardugo’s Young Adult novels expecting something similar. Warnings include rape, drug use, overdose, murder, sexual assualt of minors and adults, date rape drugs, and gore. Alex Stern, the main character, is a survivor of trauma and abuse and her story explores a lot of dark themes. I’m going to start with the most obvious thing that stood out to me reading this – it needed trigger warnings. That’s because I tried to start this book three times and just couldn’t get into it. I bought Ninth House as soon as it came out in October of last year and I am finally reading it now, nearly a year later. So, ultimately I expected to love this book. And just look at that cover, it’s beautiful. I mean, this book is basically reading candy for adult fans of Harry Potter.

Especially given that everything about this book was right up my reading alley. So, based on that fact I expected to LOVE this book too. Let me preface this with I LOVE Six of Crows. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. 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. 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. 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. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide.

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. Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class.

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