The Yale that Leigh Barudgo writes about blooms with hidden enchantment and is just authentic enough to actually seem possible, as she weaves real-life details about the university into her story. The shadow of her sordid past life still threatens the squeaky clean persona she desperately wishes to inhabit, as it did her freshman year, but now it begins to collide with her new life in alarming ways.

This second book finds Alex in her sophomore year, still struggling to find her place among the upper crust at Yale and unable to jettison some of the baggage she brought with her to New Haven from California. Rather than walking into every situation with a preternatural ability to emerge victorious, Stern fumbles along like a real person, making one mistake after another, despite her gifts that separate her from other students. Alex is a refreshing protagonist in Ninth House and Hell Bent, the polar opposite of a Mary Sue. Alex is born with the rare power to see “grays” (as ghosts are called by Lethe), and as such is an attractive get for Lethe, whose members otherwise have to drink a dangerous potion to see and keep the grays away from these rituals. These events take place in a reality much like our own, except that magic is real, and societies like Skull & Bones perform sometimes gruesome ceremonies to achieve their desired ends. In Ninth House, Galaxy “Alex” Stern was recruited to become part of Yale’s House of Lethe, which polices the other societies at the university as its eponymous ninth house. So Hell Bent, the sequel to Ninth House, can’t help but be weighed down high expectations. Barudgo breezed past these ludicrous binaries onto multiple Best of lists with Ninth House in 2020.

2019’s Ninth House was supposedly her first foray into “respectable” grownup novels and some were skeptical that she could make the jump. Leigh Bardugo had already beat the sophomore slump in her young adult “Grishaverse” novels (now also in its second season as a show on Netflix) with Siege and Storm, the sequel to Shadow and Bone.

Ninth house hell bent