Sorry, not sorry, DNFed this thing at 12 percent. I cannot with this book right now. I felt like my brain was trying to slide away. The author dumps us in the book as if we should know things that she just blithely gets into. I don't know if she world-builds later or what, but I can't keep reading this book as if I know who everyone is and what they are doing. 

"Ninth House" is the first book in the Alex Stern series. Yeah, I say first book though the author makes it seems like this is just a continuation of another book. Alex through machinations (that I managed to gather) is a student at Yale. She is there because she can see ghosts (called Grays) in this book and seems to be some record keeper of a secret society at Yale. I can't say much more than that cause this book is all over the place.

My problems are the following:

Alex Stern. Can't really say much about her besides there is not much there to keep me reading about her. We start at the end of something big happening to her and then jump back to her observing some messed up ritual. I don't even know anything besides she eats a lot of ginger candy which I do not enjoy. Also I think she has another name? I don't know. I think between that and her having a secret society name I was just done. 

Yale. I got nothing here folks. Bardugo acts like everyone who reads this book knows exactly how Yale is set up. Bardugo go into the architecture and the meaning behind said architecture a couple of places and I wondered if she has a background in history cause that's the kind of meaningless stuff historians like to just randomly tell you when you ask them a question about anything. 

World-building. It's often hard to thread the needle with world-building in the first book in a series. This is a fantasy series and they are often harder in my opinion cause readers will be the first ones to bring up how the rules the author set up in book #1, and #2 are incorrect due to whatever happens in book #3. I say readers like I don't do this too.

Bardugo went a different direction and just threw us into this world and acted like it's no big deal. I still don't get what is happening. Secret rituals to keep people rich? Alex sees Grays? Alex is called upon when a dead body shows? Sorry, this made zero sense and I just did not want to continue. The whole mystery surrounding Lethe House could have potential, I just don't want to waste my time pushing myself to the finish on this one. Too many books out there. 

Does this get better? Is there a prequel I am missing or something? There is way too much being thrown at me with no set-up. So weird.

Just a bit confusing so far for me.

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.

Okay first I like to point out again that this is very much an adult book. It touches on sexual abuse including a child, drugs and many other things. It also is pretty gory, cruel and detailed in some areas. So, while this is an fantastic book in my opinion, if those themes bother you, you might want to skip this one. This book took me a bit to get into, as I was not familiar with Yale or the secret societies within. All I know of Yale is what I saw on Gilmore Girls lol, so the setting took me a bit but after page 50 or somewhere around there it was much easier to follow. I loved Alex, she was such a flawed character and sometimes even borderline on villain, but she stood her own. She struggled, but she was true and grew. Her self-doubt was also raw but she never gave up on things. I loved how she grew throughput the book, not just herself but the friendships she made along the way. A lot of this book introduced her to us and showed us her backstory and it really was heartbreaking most of the time. I loved the Magic in this word, I also liked that we learned a lot of it though Alex as she learned it. The ghosts or Greys as they called here was something I liked as well. Pretty early in on the book it's clear that Alex can more than just see them. I was not sure how some of the things connected but at the end it came all together and made sense. I love the friendships she makes along the way and some people I really enjoyed more, or the way they were with Alex. Like Dawes, Mercy and even Turner, I like to see where things go from there. Darlington, I wasn’t sure but I really ended up liking him and I’m curious to see where that all goes. Overall, I really loved this book, even though it has some pretty cruel moments. But overall it was creepily scary and hauntingly  enjoyable and I’m looking forward to book two already.

I rate it 4.5 ★

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