I’ve been a fan of Leigh Bardugo ever since Six of Crows came out, so you’d better believe I was excited to check out her first foray into adult fiction! As per my usual lately, I haven’t had time to read, even though it feels like everyone else has tons of reading time during this pandemic. So, I got this one on audio from my library and I highly recommend it.
Despite the fact that this one was marketed as Bardugo’s first adult novel, it felt a lot like a YA to me, or at least like one of Bardugo’s YA books. My only complaint about Six of Crows is that the main characters were supposed to be teenagers, but they didn’t act or talk like teenagers. In this one, the main character is a young adult (college freshman), but still feels very much like a teenager, albeit, a teenager who’s older than her years because of everything she’s been through.
The main character’s name is Galaxy Stern, but she goes by Alex, and she can see ghosts. Other people have to take an elixir in order to be able to see ghosts, and even then, the ghosts appear to be gray, so they’re called grays. But Alex can see them in full technicolor, to the point where it took her a little while to differentiate them from other people.
Grays are attracted to blood and other things that remind them of life, and are repelled by reminders of death, which means reciting poems about death and grief is a great way to repel them, but Alex didn’t know any of this when she was attacked by a gray after getting her period. It happened on a field trip, and although the teacher figured out what happened (minus the ghost part), and told Alex’s mom her suspicions, they’re sympathetic, but they can only understand part of her fear, because how can she hide from people that can move through walls?
Once Alex realizes certain drugs make it more difficult to see the grays, which makes her feel safe, she becomes addicted, which leads to everything else that comes along with drug addiction: her mom kicks her out, she moves in with her boyfriend who’s also an addict and a dealer, she becomes a dealer and becomes acquainted with very dangerous people.
When one of those very dangerous people kills Alex’s best friend, Alex loses it, and the ghost of her friend is able to possess Alex to make her supernaturally strong so she can take her revenge.
Alex wakes up in a hospital bed after an apparent overdose with an offer of a free ride to Yale, despite the fact that she dropped out of high school.
It turns out there are certain people who have been keeping track of Alex for a while, and the fact that she can see grays without the aid of an elixir makes her useful to them. Alex’s mentor, Darlington, is astonished (and dismayed) that the one chosen for this position knows nothing of the classics or the world of the supernatural – almost as dismayed as he is to learn that she doesn’t need any help to see grays. When he asks her when she first started seeing them, the narrator remarks that it’s the wrong question. The right question is: when did she learn to be afraid of them? But Darlington never thinks to ask that because he doesn’t think grays can touch people, much less attack them.
When Alex learns that the people of Yale have been following her for a while, she’s furious that they knew what she was going through and never bothered to step in and rescue her until now.
Now she’s useful to them. But she still has to go to classes and try to maintain a decent GPA, which is hard enough for any high school dropout, much less one who has to regularly attend late-night rituals to help keep the grays at bay and make sure nothing goes wrong. It turns out that Yale has eight “tombs” or “houses”, whose members use magic and rituals to ensure they’ll be the next movers and shakers: politicians, Wall Street wolves, and Hollywood elite. That’s why they need someone like Alex to make sure nothing goes wrong while they’re performing their rituals. She and Darlington are members of the ninth house of Yale.
But something does go wrong during one of their rituals: some grays show up and almost intervene, and Alex senses something bigger trying to break through from the other side, and it almost succeeds. But no one else notices a thing.
Then a young girl is murdered just off campus and Alex suspects one of the “tombs” has something to do with it, even though everyone else is convinced her boyfriend killed her in a rage of passion.
While investigating the case, Alex gets involved with a gray known as “the bridegroom”, who killed his fiancée before killing himself almost a century ago. So Alex decides to visit the land of the dead so she can talk to the bridegroom and get some answers regarding the girl who was recently murdered. In exchange, the bridegroom wants Alex to find out who killed him and his fiancée. He doesn’t remember what happened, although he insists he wasn’t the one to do it.
As it turns out, the two cases are connected. The tombs of Yale have had a nasty habit of taking patients from the psychiatric ward of the hospital and using their entrails to predict the future. Now they knock them out for the procedure and return them safely to the hospital, but they weren’t always so “humane”. They used to just kill them because no one asks after the disappearance of a crazy person with no friends or family.
Well, one of their sacrifices wandered around town as a ghost before possessing the bridegroom, shooting the bride, and then the bridegroom. As it turns out, the bride was like Alex in that she could see grays without the help of an elixir, and when she died, she realized she could inhabit someone else’s body, but doing so requires her to eat their souls in order to maintain her strength and her control over the body.
So she’s pretty much just been living like that for the past century or so and now she’s one of Alex’s professors at Yale and recognizes that Alex’s soul is strong enough to sustain her for a while. Unfortunately for her, she could never get Alex’s name right, and since you need a soul’s full name in order to control them, Alex is able to turn the tables on her and release all the souls she had been holding captive before finally finishing her off.
Unfortunately, Alex is unable to save the dean the professor killed first, but it’s not really a loss because he was the one to kill the local girl in hopes of creating another “tomb” for Yale. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize he was missing some key “ingredients”, namely, the devouring of the soul of the deceased, which is where Alex’s professor comes in, although the dean hadn’t realized that.
As it turns out, Darlington had been investigating the bridegroom’s murder/suicide and was about to discover what the dean was up to, so the dean sent a demon after him to devour his soul. Alex was supposed to die, too, but managed to escape purely by luck.
Along with an elixir that can make people see grays (while slowly destroying their liver) are potions that grant “star power” making people more likely to help you out. The most dangerous is a purple potion that makes people very eager to please, and when it falls into the wrong hands, of course a random frat boy uses it to get girls to have sex with him while he records it. But he makes the mistake of pulling this trick on one of Alex’s roommates (who know nothing about the nine houses and think Alex is just another Yale student). Alex manages to get revenge by feeding him the potion and getting him to literally eat shit, while smiling the whole time. She records it and sends it around to the school, after making sure every trace of the video of her roommate is eradicated.
I can’t wait for the next book in this series!