Ninth House
Yale's secret societies practise real magic, and the scholarship student sent to police them can see ghosts without any help. Dark academia with actual teeth — the class rage is as sharp as the horror. On the House's scale it rates 2 for spice (warm), 2 for how much of the book is the romance, and 5 for craft. Readers who want dark academia where the darkness is the point, not the aesthetic.
Last reviewed
How it rates
- Author
- Leigh Bardugo
- Series
- Alex Stern, book 1 · series ongoing
- Spice
- Spice 2 out of 5, Warm2/5 · Warm
- Romance
- 2/5
- Plot
- 5/5
- Worldbuilding
- 4/5
- Darkness
- 5/5
- Writing craft
- 5/5
- Burn
- Slow burn
- Point of view
- third person, dual
- Ending
- No happy ending · cliffhanger
- Setting
- Yale University and the tombs beneath it
- Audience
- Adult
- Pages
- 480
On the spice rating Brief and infrequent. This is a horror novel with a romance somewhere behind it. How the scale works.
Content warnings sexual assault, drug use, graphic violence, gore, child abuse.
Tropes in this book
What to read after Ninth House
Chosen by hand rather than computed, and each one rated on the same scales.
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How we checked this
Ratings on this page are editorial judgement applied on a published scale, not aggregated reader scores. Factual details were checked against the sources below and last reviewed on .