Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1) by Leigh Bardugo · Book review

⚠️ This review contains spoilers!

Alex is a girl with an edgy dark past who can see ghosts. So she ends up at Yale with the job of watching over a bunch of rich kids in secret societies perform very unethical magic (e.g. operating on some random dude to tell the future).

For the short period of time Alex's mentor, Darlington, was around he came off as super pretentious mansplainer. As soon as he disappears though I kept reading hoping for him to come back. The book doesn't feel as exciting when Alex has to fumble through solving a murder mystery by herself.

I do enjoy how the story jumps between different periods of time as we build up to finally learning how Darlington disappeared.I also liked how it turns out that Daisy was right there all along, but the concept of Alex and other murdered girls being a "wheel" kind of comes out of nowhere and just feels like the setup for book #2.