Shadow and Bone, the Netflix show based on Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse, is the perfect cocktail of sweeping, action-packed fantasy, epic continent-spanning storylines and, at least in the first book and season, the comfort food of a magical school. This trope is a classic of high and low fantasy storytelling that often overlaps with another scholastic genre: the dark academia.
Moody, mature and drenched with nostalgic foreboding instead of illusion, dark academia usually takes place in a college or university and includes far more shades of gray than the relatively clear-cut young adult plots. One of the latest and most intriguing additions to the genre is Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, the first volume of a dark series set in a magical version of Yale, which is currently in development by Amazon Studios.
The protagonist of Ninth House is Alex Stern, a young woman who can see ghosts, a skill that was such a curse in her early life that it eventually landed her in the hospital after someone tried to kill her. She was lying on a hospital bed when House Lethe found her and offered her a free ride to Yale. The catch is she must use her gift, which includes tethering ghosts and absorbing their powers, to oversee the activities of Yale's other Eight Houses, which use magic in specific and twisted ways.
The book drops the reader in the midst of things, with Alex scrambling to solve the murder of Tara. The young woman was killed on Yale's grounds and dealt a new magical drug called Merity as well as a special kind of mushroom used in rituals to open portals to other dimensions. Thankfully, Alex has a line of hope in the friends she meets in Lethe House: Darlington, her Lethe House mentor, a senior and the last heir of a decadent mansion; Pamela, the bookish and reclusive assistant of Lethe; The Bridegroom, a ghost who has been following Alex around hoping to convince her to investigate the death of his fiancée, Daisy, more than a century ago.
Alex Stern has some things in common with Alina Starkov -- her initials, her mixed heritage, her sense of constant displacement and her unique gift. Personality-wise, she's closer to Inej, Zoya and a post-Crooked Kingdom Nina. Readers of the Six of Crows and King of Scars duologies might find some of the toughest passages of Ninth House a bit easier to digest. Without the limits imposed by Yong Adult conventions, Bardugo pulls no punches, exploring heavy topics like grooming, sexual abuse, drug addiction and extreme acts of violence and their echoes in this world and the next.
Darlington, the gentleman scholar, is so different from the intense personalities of the Darkling, Kaz and Nikolai that his time on the page feels like a warm cup of tea for the eyes. He tries his hardest to be a good person, and his slow-burn relationship with Alex is simultaneously realistic and magical; the soft balm to her spiky ends, which makes the first and last twists of his subplot that much more poignant.
Bardugo used her experiences as a Yale undergrad to write Ninth House, and most of the secret societies mentioned in the novel actually exist. Bardugo herself was part of Wolf's Head, whose power is shapeshifting. She also included tongue-in-cheek references to other famous Yale alumni and the powers that their secret societies granted them, from reading the stock market in the guts of a drunk to getting high on inspiration smoke to create their next masterpiece.
Overall, Ninth House has plenty to offer to fans of the Grishaverse and dark academia: intriguing characters, a diversified magic system and a darkly enchanting love story. These themes are accented by adding a healthy dose of horror and mystery and remaining critical of the potential abuses of power and class disparities that Ivy League ivory towers still promote.
Casting information and the release date for Ninth House are unavailable at this time.
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