Leigh Bardugo - Hell Bent

Having thoroughly enjoyed Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House, I was looking forward to the sequel a great deal. Inevitably there was going to be some disappointment. Sequels are often difficult. But I was unprepared by the extent to which I felt let down. Ninth House worked because it was able to skewer the wealthy elite who attend universities like Yale. In that book Alex "Galaxy" Stern arrives on a scholarship from a poor background. She has been deemed the next guardian of Yale's magical interests - a sort of magical cop, who is there to make sure that the various Houses don't use go beyond the permitted boundaries of their use of magic. It's ok to use it to grant wealth, power and popularity, but not too go too far. 

In the first volume Alex stumbles across a complex plot involving multiple murders. At the culmination her guide, advisor and magical tutor Darlington goes missing. The book finishes with Alex, and her friend, Dawes vowing to enter Hell to get him back. Hell Bent begins almost immediately Ninth House left off. Here lies the first problem. Hell Bent assumes you remember every detail of the first book, and reads like a continuation, not a separate volume. It also means there's no real development of details and plot, and the reader is flung headlong into the action. This might not be a problem - it is a sequel after all - but Bardugo's attempts to explain it all come off badly. 

More importantly the plot - rescuing Darlington from Hell - turns the magic of Yale into a personal rescue story. What made the first book work was its expose of the nature of Yale through its magical alternative: Skewering captains of industry, rich kids and pompous academics. This volume feels like a madcap adventure and doesn't work as well. And when Bardugo does attempt to try to explore wider issues she gets it badly wrong. At one point the heroes use a magical map to find another character. The map, actually a model of Yale, turns out to have been something used to find escaped slaves by Yale's elite. The black characters are horrified, and it feels like a Black Lives Moment when a horrible reality is exposed. Yet nothing comes of it. It feels like Bardugo recognised that she had to include more such events, but didn't know how to use them effectively.

Secondly the characters never develop. Alex constantly behaves stupidly and self-sacrificing when it completely isn't required, most of the other characters feel like wooden cut outs, particularly the black Cop, who seems quite happy to break the law on remarkably flimsy evidence. Characters who are exposed to the new magical world accept it far to readily. Finally, once Darlington is rescued, everyone just carries on after a couple of bowls of soup. PTSD just happens to other people in this universe. Hell Bent is a massively disappointing sequel - the first book promised much, but Bardugo could have used her world to discuss race, class and power in a magical setting - just as she used the first book to highlight sexism and rape in universities. Instead she throws it all away and the whole book is just a setup for the inevitable third volume. Read R.F.Kuang Babel instead.

Related Reviews

Bardugo - Ninth House
R.F.Kuang - Babel