Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


At first I didn’t find the book very realistic. It deals with demon summoning and other magical shenanigans in Yale’s secret societies. In the first chapters, I thought, “Well, this can’t be. Shouldn’t the Yalies be focusing on getting jobs at hedge funds and doing management consulting, instead of wizardry?”

But then the book explained that they used the spell-stuff to help make money and get the hedge funds ahead and that it was all a type of management consulting. So, then I thought, “Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yale students would do that.”

I have met students at Yale and other Ivy League universities, and it always struck me that they would sell their grandmother in order to get a job at a hedge fund, so doing a bit of demon-summoning is reasonable and on-brand for them.

We should all thank Ms. Bardugo for bringing the practice to light.

I was going to mark it down to 4 stars because the prose is so good that it causes me, as a struggling writer, physical pain to read writing that is much better than mine. However, I don’t want Ms. Bardugo’s demon-summoning Yalie friends to come after me, so 5 stars it is.




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