461. Ninth House

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Leigh Bardugo

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy

459 pages, published October 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Galaxy “Alex” Stern was raised in Los Angeles by a hippie mom and dropped out of school into a world of drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and worse. At 20, she is the sole survivor of a multiple homicide.  Alex is then given a second chance when she is offered the opportunity to attend Yale on a full ride scholarship.  When she arrives in New Haven, she is called upon to use her special skill to see “grays” or ghosts on behalf of Yale’s secret societies.

Quotes 

“All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down.”

 

“I let you die. To save myself, I let you die.  That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.”

 

“But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”

 

“Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get?”

 

“Only two things kept you safe: money and power.”

 

“That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.”

 

My Take

I had a hard time following the plot of this book and never really engaged with any of the characters.  A mish-mash.  Skip.