A review by kirnet
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

MAJOR TWs for SA, CSA, Assault under the influence, other sexual violence, gore, abuse. All of it, really. 

I really enjoyed the prose in this, and I ended up really loving Alex's character. I found her really compelling and was happy to follow her thoughts and actions. I love how flawed she is, as well as how she struggles to cope with it. Her relationships with the other characters are also great, mainly Dawes and North. She has a lot of on page chemistry with everyone that keeps things flowing. The story is interesting (though I did predict every twist), and the world building was interesting, but my main gripe with this book was the pacing. A lot of people mention not being invested in the book until very far in, and while I didn't have that exact problem, I did find a lot of the info dumps pretty grating. The book also spends a lot of time jumping back to the past, mostly to set up Darlington's character, or to explain parts of Alex's tragic backstory. In my opinion they happened too often and were too indulgent, really taking me out of the current storyline and investigation. I wonder if it would have been better to have made this book the second in the series, to have the first one actually show Alex and Darlington's growing relationship and ending with the cliffhanger of
Darlington getting yoinked to hell
rather than flashing back and expositing. As it stands there's too little Darlington for me to actually care about him as a character and too much Darlington for me to not get annoyed at his interruptions to the story, even if he seems like a fine character. Still, I'm excited to see where this story goes and I plan on picking up the next one.
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