Library Closure

All Chippewa River District Library locations will be closed Friday, March 29 for Good Friday.

Library Closure

All Chippewa River District Library locations will be closed Sunday, March 31 for Easter.

Ninth House - Alex Stern #1 (Bardugo)

Start Date
5 Stars

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.

I had been putting off this book for SO long mainly because when you're used to an author writing for a specific age group and in a specific genre and said author changes what and who they're writing for, it's a little bit scary.  I'm here to tell you, if you like the author's writing enough, there's a pretty good chance they could write literally anything and it would be good.  Even though Ninth House is a lot more visceral and darker than her other YA series set in the Grishaverse, I couldn't get enough.  And that's saying something coming from a person who generally stays away from all things horror, gruesome, etc.  

In the past few years I've read more urban fantasy and find that it's such a good mix of genres.  The occult in every day life, in every day places, under the nose of millions of unaware people.  There's something both exciting and unnerving about that.  In this book, Galaxy "Alex" Stern finds herself entrenched in the world of Yale's secret societies after finding out she has powers that involve seeing and communicating with the dead.  Over the course of the book we get snippets of the present and the past which feature her mentor, Darlington, teaching her the ropes of this new magic-filled world she had no idea previously existed.  I felt like I needed to speed through the book because I just KNEW the time jumps were building up to something huge and I couldn't wait to find out what that was. Let me just say I was not disappointed and I had NOT predicted who the "bad guy" was or what the build up was leading to.  I will say I am VERY glad I waited until she announced a publication date for book two because I don't know how I would have managed the wait otherwise!

There are a few triggers in this book that I will add here because while most things don't turn me off of a book, this had a lot of very gruesome and disturbing things that not everyone will be interested in reading!

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Blog User
Arielle Hemingway