Ninth House introduced us to Galaxy “Alex” Stern, a young woman whose damage and trauma run deep. Its secret societies practice not just clandestine rituals, but everything from soothsaying to necromancy. Ninth House was a major departure for Bardugo, leaving behind a folklore-inflected, war-torn fictional world inspired by tsarist Russia for a much more modern, grounded setting: Yale University, which Bardugo herself attended in the 1990s.ĭespite its strong similarities to the Yale of reality, this Yale is a richly magical world. Her epic fantasy Grishaverse novels, starting with Shadow and Bone and kicking into high gear with Six of Crows, made her a YA household name. Leigh Bardugo was already a breathtakingly successful fantasy writer before her first adult novel, Ninth House, was released in 2019. You know you’re safe in their hands whether the fantasy is epic, urban, or otherwise. Jemisin, Naomi Novik, and Samantha Shannon. Recent examples include Rebecca Roanhorse, N.K. Only a handful of impressive fantasy authors excel at both. Others sketch the outlines of a world that looks much like ours on the surface, then seamlessly weave fantastical elements throughout. Some authors in the genre excel at putting fantasy first, creating new worlds so different from our own that they have their own geography, magic, culture, conventions, and language.

Fantasy is all about situating the reader in a compelling fictional world, but some worlds are more fictional than others.

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