2nd book in the Alex Stern series
Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. Alex Stern is back and the Ivy League is going straight to hell in #1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent.
Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory―even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.
Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.
Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all too real monsters.
CW: Death, murder, violence, animal death, drug use, drug abuse, suicide attempt, slavery, sexual assault
Rating
Review
How to say gently say it? I was fucking bored!
I didn’t care about the characters. I found them so not interesting and different from the first book. I had this feeling from the beginning, and it didn’t change. I know that they lived things that made them change. I’m happy that we see an evolution, especially for Alex, who has started understanding what it means to have friends, but we lose the badass girl side, and she is now only a whizz kid. For the others, a little too bland. Also, and I may be mean, the side character’s stories don’t care. You help the task to be successful, and that’s all. I never asked myself what you have done. I don’t need a multi-pov from anywhere that didn’t make things faster and lengthen the book.
I feel like this book took a big turn toward magic, and I’m not a big fan of it. I’m not surprised by that, as the investigation of the crimes happening on campus doesn’t take much space in the book and how it was explained too quickly. You only have a reminder from time to time when they don’t search for a way to set free Darlington, but it feels more like a forced element to create a link with the first book.
This book was so painstakingly long to read, and I struggled so much to focus on it that I decided to listen to it while reading it. Doing this created frustration as I couldn’t concentrate, so I needed to put it on 1.5 instead of 1.7 or 2. The thing is that I wanted to listen to it to make the thing faster, and sadly I couldn’t.
If it were the last book, I would have DNFed it for a long time, but it’s only the second book in this series, and I needed it to know if I would continue it or DNF this series, and oh gosh, it was hard.
Sadly, it’s a series that I will DNF. I was too bored during the whole book, and even if the book is more dynamic toward the end, it’s not enough to compensate for the rest. There was one element that could have changed my mind, but sadly, we have all the explanations in this book, and it feels like the next book will continue to lean toward the magic side even more than this one.
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