Ninth House comes from Leigh Bardugo who has plenty of fantasy novels in her wake, although I have read none of them. Chosen as a book club read I could tell immediately that this book was going to be interesting. For me fantasy novels are not always something I am into. Game of Thrones? Of course I’m not an idiot. But I find it really difficult to get invested right off the bat because world building is not an easy feat. With Ninth House there are secret societies at Yale that essentially control everything from the weather to the dead to criminal cases to the stock market and all the way up to selecting the President of the United States. And you get hit with this info immediately. However it is shown to you rather than told and you experience it all through Alex’s eyes. Well done from the jump. Alex is also beautifully irreverent and one of those characters you will remember for a long while. So cracking this sucker I was immediately very interested. That said as you learn more about the world, while the plot gets juicier and more rich, I felt that the overall tone felt off. The tone being a mix between a grown up Harry Potter and an American Pie movie. I almost wanted more of the craziness with the magic and history and less of the college antics. Don’t get me wrong you get plenty of the history, but I think at times the co-ed culture comes out too strong and reminds you that this could easily be a cousin to the Harry Potter series if you took out some of the cursing. All in all a great world building novel and sets the reader up for an interesting series I imagine will be turned into a movie at some point.