Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.

I’m always down for a good dark academia read, and the third book in this series dropped earlier this week so I decided it was time to jump into this one. It was so good!

The story follows Alex Stern, a student at Yale who isn’t exactly the stuffy, rich kid you’d expect to see at such a Prestigious school. She grew up in LA with her hippie mom, dropped out of high school, spent her teenage years bouncing between dead-end jobs and getting tangled up with a string of terrible drug dealer boyfriends. By the time she’s twenty, she’s on a downward spiral. In a turn of strange luck, she ends up being the only survivor of a gruesome multiple homicide. While she’s in the hospital trying to recover she’s approached by a strange man who offers her a full scholarship to Yale. No application. No explanation. Just a seat at one of the most prestigious schools in the country, handed to her while she’s still in a hospital bed. The catch is that Yale has eight secret societies operating out of underground buildings called tombs, and someone needs to keep an eye on what they’re actually doing behind closed doors. Alex is that someone. And it turns out the societies are up to things a lot darker than the official mythology would have you believe.

I had zero trouble settling into this world, which surprised me because I usually struggle with heavy fantasy world-building. Bardugo drops a lot on you fast, but it never felt like too much. I think maybe modern/urban fantasy is more my bag. The magic system is built around ghosts, called greys, and I loved everything about how it worked. Most people who interact with greys can only do so through specific rituals but Alex can physically interact with them in ways that even the people who recruited her don’t fully understand. This made the stakes around her super high, but she’s also just a really complex and compelling character.

There’s also a murder mystery driving the story, which helped flesh out the world really well. A girl is killed early on, and Alex gets pulled into figuring out what happened. That thread also kept me engaged and sheds more light on who Alex is, what she can do compared to what others can do and also helped flesh out the world even more. The climax is also really satisfying in that it tied up the murder mystery thread but something happens that perfectly sets up book two without it ending on a cliffhanger.

Honestly, I’m a little annoyed at myself for waiting as long as I did to start this series, but the good news is now I can binge all three books. If you’re into dark academia with a hefty dose of paranormal horror and a murder mystery at its core, this one is absolutely worth your time.

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