2019 book 134

Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House
I’ve enjoyed several of Bardugo's YA novels, so was looking forward to her much-hyped adult debut—a paranormal murder mystery! I will say that I had to wait a while for my library hold to come through so my anticipation was pretty high, but the book mostly lived up to it. Like I said, it’s a paranormal murder mystery, set at Yale, where the eight super fancy secret societies are actually full of magic and mysticism and the occult! Our protagonist is a  (Sephardic Jewish!) girl from the wrong side of the tracks (her backstory was the part that didn’t work well for me) who can SEE GHOSTS, so she's been admitted to Yale under somewhat false pretenses to be part of a group that monitors all the paranormal weirdness. And then her mentor disappears, and a girl is murdered, and things really start to go off the rails. The mystery element was pretty good, although slightly convoluted, but I loved the characters, especially the growing friendships between the protagonists and other women. I will give a mega content warning here for a lot of violence against women (sexual and otherwise) which was hard to read. But I liked where this ended up and will definitely read the next one in this series. A-/B+.