#it was about poisoning mark and helly's dynamic

[maerossi]

redditers whove been complaining that the show's taking too long for the helena reveal like hush shhhh im listening to the story

[asterdeer]

finally watched the severance finale and. in a weird way I’m feeling very gomens s2 about it. in that i’m not ideologically opposed to romance-based turns in plotlines but i do think they generally fuck up a lot of what i like about a non-romantically centered story to begin with. it fractures the narrative focus. and i think i would have liked the final scene a lot more if mark and helly hadn’t been predestined for a deeply boring love story and mark had instead left gemma and gone back into lumon not for a Romantic Partner but for his team, the whole severed floor.

[cromulentbookreview]

Say, Terwilliger's a Yalie

Ladies and Gentlemen: Life for the Yale Grad at Springfield’s Minimum Security Prison.

Anyway: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo!

...the trouble had begun on a night in the full dark of Winter, when Tara Hutchins died and Alex still thought she might get away with everything.

Mors vincet/irrumat omnia.

Galaxy “Alex” Stern (ich sehe was du da getan hast, Leigh Bardugo. Galaxy Star indeed) has had it rough - by the age of twenty, she’s a high school dropout with a drug-dealing loser of a boyfriend and zero prospects. She’s definitely not someone you’d look at and say “you know, I bet that girl will get into Yale.”

Everything changes when Alex is left the sole survivor of a horrific triple homicide. While she and her best friend Hellie were passed out on fentanyl someone (or something) murdered Alex’s scumbag boyfriend, his friend and an asshole with whom they were partying. Hellie overdosed on the fentanyl; Alex didn’t. When she wakes up in the hospital, Yale’s own Dean Sandow is at her bedside with an interesting proposition: attend Yale on a full ride scholarship, never mind that she has no high school diploma or has taken any college entrance exams or anything like that (yes, I’m still bitter that I had to sit through SATs and ACTs while rich kids’ parents bought their way into the Ivy League). 

So what’s the catch? Well, Dean Sandow wants Alex to join Lethe, a society tasked with monitoring the activities of Yale’s various secret societies, like Skill and Bones, Manuscript, Scroll and Key, St. Elmo’s, etc. 

The societies at Yale are more than just rich douchebags power-brokering and patting themselves on the back for the accident of being born rich. They do that plenty, but they also dabble in the occult. Magic. Fortune telling. Portals. Necromancy. All sorts of creepy shit. Lethe House is supposed to keep them all in line. 

But why recruit Alex for this? Well, Alex has a particular talent that Dean Sandow managed to figure out: she can see ghosts. Not everyone can see the “grays” as they’re often referred to, not without taking some intense/poisonous drug first. That Alex can just see them is a rare thing, and Yale wants her for Lethe. Grays are drawn to the magic conducted during society rituals, and without someone who can see them and keep them out, they could disrupt the rituals and create havoc. Hence, why Dean Sandow is so eager to recruit Alex. 

Unfortunately, Alex isn’t exactly the college type. As she struggles through her freshman-year classes, she must also be trained in all the ways of the societies and Lethe House. Her mentor, Daniel Tabor Arlington III (he mostly goes by Darlington) is definitely golden-boy Yale material: he’s smart, he’s classy, and is basically Alex’s exact opposite. At first Darlington is frustrated by Alex’s rough edges, but after working together, they begin to respect one another. 

Until Darlington disappears under mysterious circumstances. Then a townie called Tara Hutchins is murdered on campus. Alex is certain that the societies are involved in Tara’s murder somehow, and that it’s also linked to Darlington’s disappearance, but without Darlington’s expertise, Alex is on her own. And now whoever went after Darlington and Tara is after her, too.

I absolutely loved this book. It’s the perfect Fall read - you’ve got New England, a prestigious college campus with all sorts of old buildings and such, magic, ghosts, demons, hot cocoa with fancy marshmallows...it’s definitely the sort of book you want to curl up with on a comfy couch with a cat on your lap while it’s all rainy and dark and depressing outside. If you’re looking to get into the Spooooky Halloween mood, then this is your book. The plot is twisty-turny, the writing is lush without feeling clunky, and the plot moves so quickly that you can go from page 20 to page 320 without noticing. 

If you’re a fan of Leigh Bardugo’s YA Grishaverse works, then you will be at home here - though be warned, Ninth House, like the Nevernight trilogy, is not YA. It’s not. It’s an adult book. For adults. Well, teens will enjoy it, too, so long as they’re OK with violence, the word “fuck,” and a pretty graphic depiction of a violent sexual assault. No matter your age, though, if you can’t handle that, then you might not want to read this book, because I was not kidding when I said “graphic depiction of a violent sexual assault.” There is also talk of on-campus sexual assaults because, well, Yale, like many other college campuses in the United States, has a massive problem. 

So yes, this book covers some pretty heavy topics, but Bardugo handles it beautifully. I mean, she handled similarly heavy topics in the Six of Crows series. The physical and sexual violence the characters experience in Ninth House never feels gratuitous, and at no point is trauma or pain dismissed or glossed over. This book is deeply, deeply feminist, and spends as much time reflecting on power dynamics, class and race as it does on ghosts, magic and haruspex. 

Though, once again, I’ve found myself addicted to the first book in a series. It ends with a cliffhanger. You will want more. You will get to the ending and you’ll be all

My last complaint is mostly just me and my upper-lower-middle-class-type rage, but just reading about Yale, or really, any of the Ivy League schools makes me irrationally angry. I guess my main problem isn’t with any of the schools specifically, or with anyone who has attended or worked for one, it’s just...what the Ivy League represents that makes me boil with rage. Namely, privilege. Specifically: upper-class white male privilege. Yale is the school of Brett Kavanaugh, after all. The whole Ivy League is so representative of what’s wrong with America - and the whole world, quite frankly - today. A world in which the rich get richer and the rest of us get nothing.

Plus, we’ve all known that asshole who was all “I went to [insert fancy-schmancy school here]. It's like, oh, you went to [fancy school]? Cool. I went to an overpriced private school here on the west coast that nobody's ever heard of (maybe your optometrist) whose one claim to fame was a viral video of a shrimp on a treadmill. 

That’s still a great video, though. Go, Shrimpy, go!

RECOMMENDED FOR: Adults and older teens in the mood for a real-world set fantasy with magic, secret societies, Ivy League schools, and a kickass heroine.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who immediately assumes that the book is YA because it’s written by an author who has written YA before, men’s rights activists, anyone who got into Yale because they’re a legacy, anyone demanding time-traveling trigger warnings. 

RATING: 5/5

TOTALLY UNBIASED FANGIRL RATING: 500,000,000,000/5

RELEASE DATE: October 8, 2019

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL: Olympus Mons

MORE SIMPSONS GIFS POKING FUN AT YALE:

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Flatiron Books, who sent me an ARC of Ninth House literally out of nowhere because I marked it as “highly anticipating” on Edelweiss. The noise I made when I opened the mysterious package and saw it was a copy of Ninth House probably broke the sound barrier. Thank you!