Saturday, February 8, 2020

#8: The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A poor, troubled teen --with an ability to see ghosts--finds herself mysteriously admitted to Yale, where she is tasked with overseeing the school's secret societies.  But when a young woman "townie" is found murdered, she quickly finds herself at odds with the living and the dead in Leigh Bardugo's The Ninth House.

I have never read Bardugo, who has primarily been a Young Adult author; I believe this is her first novel for adults.  And it would need to be approached by older teens with caution; it is full of sexual assaults, including by a ghost (!), casual drug use, and some gory scenes, including an opening sequence where some students use a living indigent person's organs to read the future.

Bardugo's writing is hip and engaging, and the story rockets in a cinematic fashion from one escapade to the next; only a complicated finale, with too big a thread dangling for the sequel, marred the storytelling for me.

I listened to a good audiobook reading of the book by Lauren Fortgang and Michael David Axtell, on loan from the Morrisson-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.

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