Ninth House (Bardugo)
Feb. 28th, 2020 09:26 pm4/5. OK let's give Bardugo a Hugo nomination, can we?? (2 more weeks for nominations!) I don't think this book necessarily ought to win a Hugo, but it's doing some very interesting things that I don't think anyone else in the field is really doing in the same way.
This is a book about Alex, a teen dropout/street kid who can see ghosts (these two things are very related), which gets her a scholarship to Yale under the auspices of the Yale secret society Lethe, which exists to watch over the other secret societies as they do their various magic rituals, all of which basically boil down to "use magic to consolidate money and/or power." And the book leans hard into that, and -- oh, here, have a quote from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants's review which you should all read anyway because it's much more coherent and awesome than this rambly review is going to be (and indeed ensured that not only did I decide I was going to read it, but I downloaded the Kindle sample that day):
It's horror/dark fantasy, but apparently the kind of horror that doesn't squick me out? There's a lot that could squick someone -- it gets pretty graphic at times -- but it's usually heavily telegraphed and has so much plot surrounding it that I think there was only one place where I started flipping to get through it quickly. Also I think part of it is because the real horror of it is not the rape or the violence (both of which are present in this book), but the institutionalized horror, the horror that seems on the surface pretty and nice.
I also thought it was really interesting how Bardugo talked about power and the ways that power corrupts, all of which is very much woven into the worldbuilding and the plot. I mean, there's the whole institutionalized privilege thatskygiants talks about, and then in sort of the personal version of that, there's how individual people react to having power (often in an institutionalized fashion, but not always): almost always badly, often very badly. But not always. (And in that "not always" is what hope there is, in the book.)
I also found the parallel between Alex's ability and mental disorders quite interesting. Because Alex can see ghosts and no one else can (and sometimes the ghosts are violent towards her -- but others can see her reaction and not the ghosts, of course), she gets into all kinds of trouble, primarily socially. And eventually she starts self-medicating with alcohol and weed. And of course her mother doesn't know what to do about it...
One review I saw compared it to The Magicians in the sense of talking about how magic isn't like Narnia, it isn't an escape, it isn't numinous. The way magic can be misused is an explicit theme in the book -- and yet I liked Ninth House rather more than I liked The Magicians.ase wondered if this was because it didn't have terrible Quentin POV, which... yeah, is probably a large part of it. (Alex is a great POV!) I think also that Bardugo gives it more ambiguity; magic is usually awful and because people are usually awful, people usually use it in awful ways. But occasionally... yes, it can be numinous; occasionally there is grace. But it's a kind of grace that is dependent upon people, really; not as intrinsic to the magic itself as we might like to think.
It also, like Six of Crows, ends on a cliffhanger, so be aware of that. I mean, the main storyline is wrapped up well, but there's one significant loose end that is dangling out there the whole time, and that is the cliffhanger to jumpstart the (presumed) next book.
But what I really want to talk about is that I had a... rather visceral reaction to this book in a lot of ways, not least because my alma mater was... more like than unlike the university in this book. (This is a big reason why I was so interested in reading it.)
Some of the things I thought about while reading it:
( Cut for length and (even more!) rambling. )
Anyway. So yeah, this made me think a lot. I liked The Magicians despite all the really obnoxious things about it because it made me think; Ninth House made me think, and think about deeper things than Magicians, without that particular brand of obnoxiousness. But yeah, all the content notes for this one, and curiously, although I loved it, like Magicians I will probably never reread the whole thing. (Not because of the graphic content; I can't articulate exactly why.)
This is a book about Alex, a teen dropout/street kid who can see ghosts (these two things are very related), which gets her a scholarship to Yale under the auspices of the Yale secret society Lethe, which exists to watch over the other secret societies as they do their various magic rituals, all of which basically boil down to "use magic to consolidate money and/or power." And the book leans hard into that, and -- oh, here, have a quote from
skygiants's review which you should all read anyway because it's much more coherent and awesome than this rambly review is going to be (and indeed ensured that not only did I decide I was going to read it, but I downloaded the Kindle sample that day):
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.
It's horror/dark fantasy, but apparently the kind of horror that doesn't squick me out? There's a lot that could squick someone -- it gets pretty graphic at times -- but it's usually heavily telegraphed and has so much plot surrounding it that I think there was only one place where I started flipping to get through it quickly. Also I think part of it is because the real horror of it is not the rape or the violence (both of which are present in this book), but the institutionalized horror, the horror that seems on the surface pretty and nice.
I also thought it was really interesting how Bardugo talked about power and the ways that power corrupts, all of which is very much woven into the worldbuilding and the plot. I mean, there's the whole institutionalized privilege that
skygiants talks about, and then in sort of the personal version of that, there's how individual people react to having power (often in an institutionalized fashion, but not always): almost always badly, often very badly. But not always. (And in that "not always" is what hope there is, in the book.)I also found the parallel between Alex's ability and mental disorders quite interesting. Because Alex can see ghosts and no one else can (and sometimes the ghosts are violent towards her -- but others can see her reaction and not the ghosts, of course), she gets into all kinds of trouble, primarily socially. And eventually she starts self-medicating with alcohol and weed. And of course her mother doesn't know what to do about it...
One review I saw compared it to The Magicians in the sense of talking about how magic isn't like Narnia, it isn't an escape, it isn't numinous. The way magic can be misused is an explicit theme in the book -- and yet I liked Ninth House rather more than I liked The Magicians.
ase wondered if this was because it didn't have terrible Quentin POV, which... yeah, is probably a large part of it. (Alex is a great POV!) I think also that Bardugo gives it more ambiguity; magic is usually awful and because people are usually awful, people usually use it in awful ways. But occasionally... yes, it can be numinous; occasionally there is grace. But it's a kind of grace that is dependent upon people, really; not as intrinsic to the magic itself as we might like to think.It also, like Six of Crows, ends on a cliffhanger, so be aware of that. I mean, the main storyline is wrapped up well, but there's one significant loose end that is dangling out there the whole time, and that is the cliffhanger to jumpstart the (presumed) next book.
But what I really want to talk about is that I had a... rather visceral reaction to this book in a lot of ways, not least because my alma mater was... more like than unlike the university in this book. (This is a big reason why I was so interested in reading it.)
Some of the things I thought about while reading it:
( Cut for length and (even more!) rambling. )
Anyway. So yeah, this made me think a lot. I liked The Magicians despite all the really obnoxious things about it because it made me think; Ninth House made me think, and think about deeper things than Magicians, without that particular brand of obnoxiousness. But yeah, all the content notes for this one, and curiously, although I loved it, like Magicians I will probably never reread the whole thing. (Not because of the graphic content; I can't articulate exactly why.)
