Alex ✰ Comets and Comments ✰'s Reviews > Ninth House

"That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. "

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-dnf @30%-
I don't think I have ever been more disappointed in myself for not being able to love this book. Leigh Bardugo continues to be my queen of fantasy, this one was just a complete and utter miss for me.
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*all the sighs*
I'm still not certain that this review will get all my thoughts across. I'm also very blatantly stating this now... because I DNFed this book, this review isn't going to be able to provide any summaries, commentaries etc etc. It's partially why I didn't give it a rating; firstly because I couldn't even get halfway and secondly, because I think I might return to Ninth House at a future date. I want to give this book more of a chance but as it stands now, this was not for me.



I've read a lot of people opinions on how it gets better and I'm holding on to that for the next time I try. A caveat though; this book and everything about it (aside from it being Fantasy) really shouldn't be compared to the Grishaverse or Leigh's previous books. They are intended for two different types of demographics and Ninth House deals with some very heavy "adult" themes.

To start things off (very bluntly), I got bored. There was nothing that kept me turning the pages other than self-determination and it came to a point where even that wasn't enough. I was doing that thing where you read a paragraph and then read it again (3 times) because you realize you weren't paying any attention at all...I found the pacing in this book to be excruciatingly slow. Nothing significant enough was happening that had me at the edge and the "mysterious" elements didn't hold enough suspense or warrant excitement from me. Again, this opinion is simply my own and it might have been a fact of picking this book at the wrong time.

Another key thing I noticed that caused -several- naps whilst reading was the writing style. The writing in this book is very narrative, and while it's not without merit, it simply didn't captivate me. I felt like it was telling me, rather than showing me and I craved for emotional description from the characters. Which leads me to another note...I got really weary of Darlington. This is going to be very problematic because A LOT of people place him as the winning character of this book. Still, I found myself leaning towards wanting Alex's chapters more than his. Nothing about Darlington made me anticipate meeting him...



There were way too many infor-dumps and if I had to sum up my reading experience, it would be a quote directly from this book:
"You start out excited, and by page two you realize it’s all a lot of words and not much drama." When I saw that, I felt like I was being called out to be honest (drama in this case meaning something actually, yknow... HaPpEnIng). I needed to stop reading before it put me in a slump, so I did. On another note though, Amazon Studios is going to develop this into a series and THAT, I'm looking forward to. It might just push me to read it before I watch it!

Buddy Read with this cutie although, I don't really know if it counts because she's being a trooper and still reading and I'm now just waving the moral support flag.


pre-review
do i have a considerable amount of books that i already need to read? would i drop (quote me on this) everything for this? if leigh bardugo wrote a 100,000 word essay on the growing strategies of cacti, would i also do the same? yes, yes and also yes.



"By the time Alex managed to get the blood out of her good wool coat, it was too warm to wear it. Spring had come on grudgingly; pale-blue mornings failed to deepen, turning instead to moist, sullen afternoons, and stubborn frost lined the road in high, dirty meringues....
....That was in the spring. But the trouble had begun on a night in the full dark of winter, when Tara Hutchins died and Alex still thought she might get away with everything."