NINTH HOUSE

By Leigh Bardugo

When a writer sets a fantasy novel in our dusty old real world, the general approach is: “Everything cruddy just like it is now, except, also magic!” The intrusion of magic is then generally used to make sense of inexplicable or terrible things in our world, for example, why the stock market does stuff. And cancer. It also is used to explain the sadness that young people feel. If only there were an enormous secret lurking just out of sight, providing meaning and conveying specialness upon the knower. …

The latest entrant into the wonderful and ever-growing library of “like here but magical!” literature is Leigh Bardugo’s “Ninth House,” set on the Yale campus in New Haven, that creepy old witchland. The secret societies there, like Scroll and Key and Skull and Bones, each have an array of magical powers that rich young people have been abusing for generations. (This explains the frankly quite bizarre architecture of Yale better than “rich people sure are weird.”) In “Ninth House,” the university’s secret societies are being watched by a powerful and even more secret society, Lethe.

The newest recruit to Lethe is Galaxy Stern, who has a very troubled past and, relatedly, has the rare and quite awful ability to see ghosts. Turns out they’re all around us! She is grateful, we slowly learn, to start over at Yale. Her story and the inevitable abuses of power she encounters unfold together.