skygiants

I didn't have strong feelings about picking up Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House -- I really enjoyed the Six of Crows books, but all I'd heard about Ninth House was that it was Bardugo's first adult novel and extremely dark/horror-ish, and I have some horror limits.

But then aquamirage told me that I would probably like it, so I put myself on the extremely long library hold list, and as is often the case it turned out that she was absolutely correct. Ninth House is indeed quite dark and fairly graphic and fully engaged with themes of trauma, sexual violence against kids and teens, substance addiction, and wildly cavalier abuse of privilege, and is also kind of a ... romp is definitely the wrong word? But, dang, the book moves! It's not just extremely readable, but satisfying to read in a way that I think is primarily a function of Bardugo's skilled prose and secondarily a function of how satisfying Alex Stern is a protagonist: she takes decisive action, and it is often not the correct decisive action but it does always feel grounded in her worldview and it certainly keeps the plot rolling.

The plot: Alex Stern sees and occasionally traumatically interacts with ghosts, which through the course of her young adulthood led her down a lot of dead-end paths in attempts to see less ghosts. One of these ended in a scene of mass violence and Alex in the hospital ... from which she was directly recruited into Yale University! by way of Lethe House, the secret society that watches over all of Yale's other secret societies, which all specialize in different mildly horrific and unethical varieties of magic to ... boost the careers of their alumni! That's it, that's all they want to do. It's one hundred percent plausible and one hundred percent gross and a perfect literalized metaphor for the way systems of institutionalized privilege and Yale's actual real-world secret societies work in the real, non-magical world. Literally nothing about this worldbuilding required suspension of disbelief in any way.

Anyway, into the middle of this world comes Alex, who is only there because Lethe House is interested in ghost research, but who is nonetheless determined to seize the opportunity presented and get herself back en route to a viable future via a Yale degree. Alas, various things inevitably interfere with her plan to stay the course and keep her head down, including but absolutely not limited to murder.

There are a lot of books about sinister worlds of privilege, and most of those books spend a lot of time on how seductive and glamorous those sinister worlds of privilege are; you know they're bad, but, like, in a sexy way! The thing I really appreciate about Ninth House is that it does not do this at all. Yale is alluring to Alex because it offers her an opportunity to reinvent herself on the model of Normal Kid Having A Normal College Experience, but the more she sees of the ultra-privileged back end, the grosser it looks both to her and to the reader. It's explicitly all the same kinds of violence and misogyny and abuse that she encountered among the drug dealers she hung out with in her teens, just dressed up in a fancier coat. The things that ground her, and the allies she makes, aren't the people on the inside of that world of privilege: instead it's the mousy grad student who took a low-level job with Lethe in an attempt to finish her dissertation, the ghost whose death may have been a consequence of nineteenth-century society shenanigans, the roommate who doesn't know anything about the magic but suffers the consequences of its abuse at a frat party and comes out for her in the clutch. (It's also their reluctant cop liaison who dislikes everything the secret societies stand for, whom I liked as a character while at the same time wishing a little bit that while we were calling out systems of privilege we could get away from The Cop as representative of The Good Guy Who Wants To See Justice Done.)

I also liked: how difficult it was for Alex to stay on top of Yale classwork as someone extremely smart in ways very different from the ones that Yale recognizes and rewards; the extremely grounded and well-described sense of place and location; and the use of Sephardic poetry in the plot. A good book! I will read the next one!

Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows is not much at all like the Heist Society books except in the crucial central factors of a.) having a plot that would probably make a lot more sense if everyone involved was at least ten years older but b.) nobody cares because everyone loves TEENS DO A HEIST!!!

Six Of Crows is set in an approximately nineteenth-century-tech fantasy world in which certain people called Grisha are born with moderate magical/telekinetic/healing powers. Somebody has discovered a highly addictive substance that amplifies Grisha powers a bajillionfold and then burns them rapidly out. As a result, a crack team of teenaged criminals from the alt!Amsterdam slums has been hired for an equivalent bajillionfold amount of dollars to break the scientist who invented the substance out of alt!Russian prison!

The team includes:

- Kaz, a notoriously ruthless (sixteen-year-old) gang leader with a genius brain, a limp, and a vendetta against another gang leader whom he holds responsible for his brother's death
- Inej, a (sixteen-year-old) acrobat and aerialist, who's working through her contract with Kaz's gang so she can leave and find the family she was stolen from
- Jesper, a (sixteen-year-old) gambling addict and sharpshooter with a crush on Kaz
- Matthias, a (sixteen-year-old) Grisha-hunting alt!Russian soldier who has spent the last year in prison thanks to
- Nina, a (sixteen-year-old) Grisha with healing powers who has spent the last year trying to get Matthias out of prison
- Wylan, a runaway merchant's son who functions simultaneously as hostage and demolitions expert

...OK, it actually makes a lot of sense for Wylan to be sixteen (and once Wylan is sixteen Jesper also has to be sixteen or else their ongoing flirtation throughout the book gets weird) (and then I guess everyone else has to be sixteen also) (plus OK it's a YA novel) (BUT I DIGRESS)

Anyway, like I said, who doesn't like 'TEENS DO A MAGIC HEIST'? This was a highly enjoyable read with solid worldbuilding, and it's always so refreshing to read a YA fantasy novel in which no super-talented teens seem likely to have a magic destiny or rule a kingdom, they just want to earn a cool bajillion dollars in order to pay off their gambling debts.

(Fair warning though, I did not know this was the first in a series when I picked it up and there is a MASSIVELY cliffhanger ending.)

(Also fair warning, pretty much every single teen has a dramatic tragic backstory, some of which include slavery/harm to children/sexual violence.)

(Also there is one scene with REALLY GROSS EYEBALL STUFF.)