Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) by Leigh Bardugo

Whenever there was a murder, I found it fun to try and guess who did it… I loved the unpredictability of it all.

The magic he had been promised…was dangerous and alluring, and it did not seek to entertain.

Daniel Arbor Darlington – Ninth House

Although my literary tastes have veered towards contemporary fiction as I have grown older, nothing captures the portable magic that books possess as much as stories like Ninth House. Before I get into my thoughts on Ninth House, let me briefly summarise the plot.

Plot

Galaxy Alex Stern is a member of Lethe House, one of the nine prominent houses or societies of magic. Lethe House, the ninth, was created to monitor and keep the activities of the other eight houses in check. When a girl is found murdered, Alex’s intuition leads her to discover secrets that someone will kill to keep hidden.

Spoiler alert: She can see ghosts.

Thoughts

I found it difficult to get into Ninth House, and that’s the only thing I didn’t like about the book. To be fair, getting into the fantasy elements of a story can be daunting. In this case, it took me a while to understand what was happening, who was doing what, and how some things worked. For example, I couldn’t understand which House was which or what they specialized in (there’s a section at the end that describes the Houses of the Veil). I only got the hang of it about halfway into the book.

What I liked was the story, and even better, I liked Alex as a character. I read Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology first and loved all the characters in it. Then I read the Grisha Trilogy and totally disliked them. Alex Stern was different in a way that I liked; she was hard, like Kaz Brekker.

The magical elements in the story were okay; nothing particularly extraordinary or new, so I wasn’t particularly fascinated by them. However, the plot twists made up for it. Whenever there was a murder, I found it fun to try and guess who did it. Although I didn’t always find the plot twists easy to understand, I loved the unpredictability of it all. The story left me with a lot of curiosity, and I look forward to reading the sequel.

Themes

Ninth House is not a good versus evil story. I liked that there was no single villain; it is more about themes such as oversight, greed, and trauma. It is a dark and violent story, but not gruesome.

The story is told from the viewpoints of Alex Stern and Darlington, her mentor at Lethe House, and alternates between the past and present. Although I initially found it difficult to understand when was when I got the hang of it after a while.

Rating

I would give this a rating of 3.5 out of 5. I really enjoyed the story and the world it was built. If you have not read it yet, I would definitely recommend it.