Ninth House
Leigh Bardugo
Real-life fantasy
Ninth House takes place mostly in two locations: Los Angeles, where our hero grew up, and Yale, where she is a student. Our hero is Galaxy (Alex) Stern. (Leigh Bardugo knows, I am sure, that "Stern" is German for "star".) Bardugo lives in LA and is a Yale graduate (1997) and currently, as of 15-Jun-2023, an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale.)
The title, Ninth House, is a reference to the Yale secret societies. There are a bunch of these -- Wikipedia lists 18. In the Yale of Ninth House, there are eight large and powerful such societies. All of these are real, in the sense that in each case, a secret society of that name actually exists at Yale. Alex belongs to a ninth house, Lethe, that doesn't exist in the real Yale (or at least it doesn't have a Wikipedia page). Each of the eight major houses in Ninth House specializes in some form of sorcery, which they use to advance their interests. For instance, Skull and Bones specializes in predicting the future by reading the entrails of victims -- they use this to predict the future movements of markets and to direct investments. The eight houses are wealthy and powerful. (The final sentence is true also of the corresponding real Yale secret societies.)
Lethe's charge is to rein the eight houses in -- to make sure they don't do dangerous or illicit things. In a note in the end matter Bardugo writes
Excluding Black Elm, which is an amalgam of several homes, every building in Ninth House is real and can be visited in New Haven.
Il Bastone, the house in which Lethe, resides, is likewise based on a real building, although of course the real building on which Lethe House is based is not the headquarters of a Yale secret society. (As far as we know -- if it's REALLY secret, would we?) As a Yale student Bardugo herself was a member of one of the eight houses, Wolf's Head.
Alex has a gift -- she sees ghosts. This gift also makes her vulnerable as a child -- the chapters describing her childhood make terribly, terribly grim reading. Her gift makes her particularly valuable to Lethe. As a result she is offered a position in Lethe House and a full scholarship at Yale.
Alex is not (in my opinion) exactly a good person, but she loves her friends, and she has a sense of justice. Thus, when a girl is murdered, Alex insists on investigating the murder. Indeed, Ninth House is a murder mystery but also the story of Alex's hunt for justice for the murdered girl.
I didn't like the way the story ended. At 93% there's a "Yer a wizard, Harry." moment, that names and categorizes Alex's gift. I didn't like this at all. It diminished Alex. From the self-reliant, if damaged, girl working it out on her own, she became suddenly a member of a class. I would have been much happier if Alex's gift had remained idiosyncratic.
What makes Ninth House special, and induces me to give it a five-star rating, is that it feels very, very real. I have already described how closely based on real things the book is. What's more, Alex's terrible childhood is not just the terrible childhood of a girl vulnerable to magic -- it is also the terrible childhood of a vulnerable girl, in most important respects just like the childhoods of many vulnerable girls.
The Yale secret societies are in actual fact wealthy and immensely powerful. Of course, I am pretty sure that Skull and Bones does not read the entrails of human victims to predict movements of the stock markets. I am quite certain, however, that people associated with Skull and Bones (probably investment managers rather than students) do use arcane arts that go by names such as Stochastic Calculus and Efficient Market Theory to predict the movement of markets and direct investments. These are legal, of course, and -- their practitioners would certainly argue -- harmless if not beneficial. But those of us who lived through the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent depression might find reason to doubt it.
The upshot is that, to me, the world of Ninth House barely felt fictional. The murder mystery is, of course, a work of fiction, and the fantasy elements of Alex's gift and the magic of the houses are fictional. But to me the fantasy elements felt like a transparent mask over grim realities.