In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours they’re wielders of actual magic.
A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. The protagonist of Bardugo’s ( King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story. With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain. Jemisin ( The Shadowed Sun, 2012, etc.) is utterly unflinching she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. The tragic trap of the orogene's life is told through three linked narratives (the link is obvious fairly quickly): Damaya, a fierce, ambitious girl new to the Fulcrum Syenite, an angry young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor and who stumbles across secrets her masters never intended her to know and Essun, searching for the husband who murdered her young son and ran away with her daughter mere hours before a Season tore a fiery rift across the Stillness. The “lucky” ones are recruited by the Fulcrum, where the brutal training hones their powers in the service of the Empire. While they’re necessary, they’re also feared and frequently lynched. They can quiet earthquakes and quench volcanoes…but also touch them off. It’s also occupied by a small population of orogenes, people with the ability to sense and manipulate thermal and kinetic energy. The continent ironically known as the Stillness is riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and periodically suffers from Seasons, civilization-destroying tectonic catastrophes. In the first volume of a trilogy, a fresh cataclysm besets a physically unstable world whose ruling society oppresses its most magically powerful inhabitants.
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