saltwitch 's review for:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
2.75
mysterious fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
I sort of appreciated the world-building and the idea of Alex’s character (anti-preppy tough girl whose street smarts/found strength help her along the way), and I was fairly invested in the mystery. But I felt like the characterization was super weak— a lot of different characters acted/made decisions that didn’t feel earned— and the connections between characters weren’t developed at all. We were supposed to be invested in Alex’s friendship with her roommates but never once saw them doing “friend” things/acting like friends.
I didn’t feel/see any evidence why Alex would care about Darlington at all and therefore didn’t understand why she was desperate to get him back.
Lots of telling of backstory, but I felt like I was simply told who these characters were but not made to feel the wholeness of their presence. They never really rose out of the page like I was hoping for. The timeline jumps weren’t a very effective device in this novel and just made the plot harder to follow. The plot twists at the end were super forced. My biggest issue with the book is that I felt the author seemed to be trying to take on violence against women/girls to try to make the novel more important but it didnt actually feel like there was any real justice for the victims in her story, and she created easy villains to dislike/relied on tropes rather than meaningfully interrogating the intersections of gender/class and institutional violence. For example,
Alex embarrassing her roommate’s abuser couldn’t possibly have “fixed” the horrible violence and trauma she experienced but the story kind of acts like Alex meting out justice resolved everything? And everyone at Yale getting the video file as a text and opening it all at the same time … ?
Idk, all of the very graphic SA scenes (
r*pe of a young girl by a ghost??
) at best didn’t feel dealt with in a meaningful way, and at worst read like voyeuristic trauma porn, which was sort of disappointing
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