Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

There is no doubt that Leigh Bardugo is smart, probably brilliant, and she’s a talented writer. It’s just a shame that she feels such a need to prove that in her writing. “Ninth House” by Leigh Bardugo is a good book and an excellent story that is, for me, drug down by the structure, which made it far harder for me to connect to what was happening than was necessary.

The Story of Ninth House

Ninth House is a character driven mystery. It manages to be both heavy and light on plot. A lot of things happen in the book and all of them are technically important to the plot, but a lot of them don’t really seem to matter much at all.

The main character is Alex, a woman who can see ghosts. This ability makes her unique among the people in Yale who use magic, and they recruit her to serve as a campus security for the eight houses of Yale, based on real secret societies, and each able to use a different type of magic. She is a high-school dropout but thanks to her ability she is given a full ride scholarship to Yale.

The story moves between different time periods. It spends a lot of time in Alex’s childhood, but it also goes between different parts of her time at Yale. This is where the structure of the story got in the way for me. I understand the reason for it, and the flashbacks to childhood were fine, but the parts in Yale felt unnecessary.

It also became clear very early on that they were going to visit each of the eight houses. This is fine, and if I were more invested in the story at that point, I might have liked it more. But because most of the time they were visiting unfamiliar houses it was in one of the section of the story that was set before the primary mystery of the story it felt mostly unnecessary.

The mystery itself had several twists and turns, and yet while I hadn’t figured out everything, almost nothing in it surprised me. It seemed inevitable the major mysteries of the story included the houses, the nexus of power were made for the houses, and the strange ability that Alex had would all come together. Perhaps that comes down to my problem with most mysteries. As a writer, I tend to “solve” them not by spotting the clues but by understanding the structure of story. You could give the principal character mysterious powers, but by spending so much time focusing on it, it became clear it had to be central to the plot.

What I liked about Ninth House

The character of Alex was a well flushed out and interesting character and the cost of her power was interesting and well explained. It made her feel like what the kid from The Sixth Sense might be like as an adult after spending his entire childhood dealing with seeing death. And while having the main character be an outsider finding her place in the world isn’t exactly fresh, there is a reason that is used so often and this was done exceptionally well.

The side characters were generally well done too. Characters like her roommate who didn’t have a lot to do still felt important and some more minor villains really felt like the characters you occasionally see on the news getting away with unforgivable crimes because of their parents wealth and power with the excuse that they were children who have to learn which seems a poor excuse for doing something that could ruin someone’s life.

What I liked less about Ninth House

As I mentioned before, the structure of the story bothered me. In part that may have been because listing to it as an audio book it was much easier to miss the single word or line that marked the switches between times than it would have been in a book. But it mostly didn’t feel necessary.

Beyond that, there were more than a few places where the prose distracted me. Telling me that the character’s lips were as red as overripe cherries is good writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the story, and for me it often was distracting.

Conclusion

It took me far longer to get into this book than I would have liked, and it clearly isn’t written in a style that I typically love. That said, by the end of the book it really had drawn me in and I think it’s safe to assume that someone who likes this magical mysteries and enjoys the prose and perhaps is more interested in the structure would find it much better. Because it is my aversion to literature and preference for enjoyable books that made it a bit of a struggle at first, and not everyone feels that way or should.