Ninth House

CW: rape, murder, physical abuse, drug abuse

beleaguered sigh I have come to accept that Bardugo is hit or miss for me. Six of Crows duology are two of my favorite books of all time and I loved her take on Wonder Woman. The Grisha trilogy was lackluster for me, but I figured that was because it was her first books. But then King of Scars came out and was baffling.

The Ninth House took me almost two months to read and again I'm left a bit baffled because similarly to King of Scars, Bardugo couldn't decide what kind of book she wanted to right. (Granted, TNH was much closer in tone as a whole than KOS.)

Overall, I wasn't impressed. I'm a huge Agatha Christie fan and I just found the mystery difficult to follow. What makes a good murder mystery (for the most part) is that you know all the players almost immediately and it's watching them squirm for the entire book as they all get introduced and slowly start to unravel since all of them had motives. The suspects were too slowly introduced and spread out that I frankly forgot about half of them when the book finally picked up. And when it was revealed who the murderer was I didn't even care.

The second twist/reveal (which played more to the horror side) was surprising-ish, but frankly really downplayed the whole murder mystery reveal even more.

I'm going to talk about three “plot important” sexual assaults under the spoiler tag below.

But my main beef with this book was the inclusion of rape. I'm going to try and keep it succinct. Mainly, I believe that you do not need rape 99% of the time. It is usually, as in this case, used for shock and disgust value where authors struggle to either show danger, vulnerability or horror.I almost quit reading when Alex was raped by a ghost in the bathroom on middle school field trip. It felt so unnecessary. I cannot for the life of me think that Bardugo had to go that far to show why Alex was ostracized and turned to drugs.It gave Alex the excuse to be frankly a jerk for the whole of the book. She rarely was funny in doing so and often I was on the side of the police or whatever random adult she was pushing away.The death of Hellie would've been traumatic without the overblown characture of Ariel being a sadistic rapist as well as murderer.The only rape that made sense to include was Mercy's, but even then at that point all I could think was Bardugo was reaching for ways for people to be absolute monsters and she only had one answer.

Over all I found the book gratuitous in gore with little horror with a main character that came off more like an asshole than clever. Never once did I think Alex was a step ahead or figuring things out until it was time for her to “know”. Suddenly she had answers and it was pretty much out of nowhere. 

This started as a two star review but after writing all of this I couldn't really think of a good reason to give it another star. 1.5/5 because sometimes the magic was interesting.