Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
LEIGH BARDUGO - NINTH HOUSE
Open sesame! Join a girl named Galaxy, a transgressed protagonist with a hero complex who communes with the dead like nobody's business, the sole edge granting a high school dropout a full ride to Yale.
Double, double, toil and trouble! Come see this detective/addict/call girl/killer/sexual abuse victim/gothic heartthrob "Alex" get recruited to police Yale's 8 secret houses, a posh collection of alumni-endorsed scions of world leaders who do their bidding through the macabre divination of haruspicy (reading human corpse guts, in this case to predict market changes for the alumnists who fund their Ivy lifestyles).
Alakazam! Watch Alex Stern stir the cauldron, usurping norms while trying to navigate college banality: spanish class, keeping magicked-up roofies out of her solo cups, and suffering sorcerous mansplaining.
This is as much cultural grimoire as it is story. It studies the zeitgeist of elitist entitlement of Yale's 8 secret and very real societies. Instead of training up the new generation of CEOs and hedge fund managers, though, the societies' members are bestowed with occult knowledge which allows them to outclass the rest of the world and stay atop their Ivy pedestal. Manuscript's glamours, Wolf's Head's shapeshifters, Book and Snake's necromancy.
In a time when truth is under question, there's no better medium to allegorize the world than through the beautiful magic of metaphors. This book is everything that makes fiction magical. It dresses up truths so we can consider issues more deeply than we would from a pundit. Real issues served up with other-worldly stakes.
It's about capitalism and carnage. Sexual violence and spell-casting. Ghosts, really good laughs and charms in spades. This is the epitome of serious fiction. Ya, whatever, a dude walks through walls and demons eat people, but fiction is just a lie that tells the truth. A literary sleight of hand. That's this, through and through.
Leigh Bardugo conjures eye-popping realism in her debut adult novel with enchanting prose and spellbinding twists. Give yourself the gut check you deserve and abracadabra yourself into Ninth House.