Can’t Wait Wednesday: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted at Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they’re books that have yet to be released. It’s based on Waiting on Wednesday, hosted by the fabulous Jill at Breaking the Spine.

Title: Ninth House

Series: Alex Stern

By: Leigh Bardugo

Pages: 480

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Release Date: October 1, 2019

Blurb from GoodReads: Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

Why I’m excited for it: Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom are two of my favorite books.  I devoured them both in just a couple days.  I loved the characters, their banter was witty and fun, the plot was action packed, the pacing was perfect, the world was gritty, and the cast was diverse.  When I later tried to read the Grisha trilogy, I was less enthralled.  Maybe if I had read them first, I would have liked them more, but at the time they felt fairly generic.

From Leigh’s tumblr page book announcement: “I should mention that [Ninth House] is adult, not YA and will be published as such. It goes some very dark places and it is meant to disturb.”  Being an adult novel won’t make it inherently better, but I feel like Bardugo excels with dark and gritty.  If she’s going full adult I’m super excited to see what she can do with it.

I’ve also seen the words thriller, supernatural, and occult kicked around in relation to Ninth House, and there’s no better place to do that than New England!  It does seem like a vast departure from her usual fare, but I’m hoping that’s a good thing.  I can’t wait to see what she’ll do with it.

What about you?  What new releases are you excited for?