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Dead Beat: Yale, Demons, and the Cost of Privilege · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: The first sentence of this novel belongs to a man
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  Speaker 1: who is no longer only a man. The book tells
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  Speaker 1: us that once, when he was still entirely human, he
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  Speaker 1: understood his city. A small, old, and expensive city in Connecticut.
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  Speaker 1: And understood the bad bargains it had made. Then the
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  Speaker 1: sentence moves on and leaves you holding that phrase. Bad bargains.
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  Speaker 1: A city that signed its deals in good ink. and
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  Speaker 1: trusted that someone else would settle the account when it
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  Speaker 1: came due. Keep that phrase close, because everything that follows
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  Speaker 1: it is a bill arriving. At the end of the
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  Speaker 1: previous volume, a young woman walked into hell to bring
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  Speaker 1: someone back. She succeeded. On the way out, a demon
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  Speaker 1: used her blood to wedge the door so it could
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  Speaker 1: not close, and now the things on the other side
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  Speaker 1: coming through. They walk the alleys behind the college bars
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  Speaker 1: and sit in the dining halls. They feed on the
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  Speaker 1: living and frighten the dead, and every night there are
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  Speaker 1: more of them than the night before. Under all of
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  Speaker 1: it runs the oldest question you can ask about a debt.
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  Speaker 1: Who pays for the doors she left open? The novel
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  Speaker 1: is Deadbeat, the third and final book in Leigh Bardugo's
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  Speaker 1: Ninth House trilogy, published in September 2026. seven years after
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  Speaker 1: the first. The right way into it is through the author,
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  Speaker 1: because Bardugo is no outsider throwing stones at Yale. She
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  Speaker 1: went there. As a first-year student, she walked past the
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  Speaker 1: windowless tombs where the university's secret societies meet, and the
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  Speaker 1: image stayed with her long enough to become three novels
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  Speaker 1: about magic practiced by the rich in buildings nobody else
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  Speaker 1: can enter. Today, she holds a fellowship at one of
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  Speaker 1: Yale's residential colleges. The critic of the house has a
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  Speaker 1: room in it, and that detail matters more than it looks,
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  Speaker 1: because this is a book that wants two things at
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  Speaker 1: once and knows it. The heroine is Alex, a young
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  Speaker 1: woman from the bottom of American life, a dropout with
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  Speaker 1: a dead best friend and a gift nobody wanted. She
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  Speaker 1: can see ghosts. Yale offered her a full scholarship for
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  Speaker 1: that gift alone, and the arrangement had a purpose— The
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  Speaker 1: societies were reading the future in human entrails and opening
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  Speaker 1: doorways across the planet, and someone had to keep watch
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  Speaker 1: over them, a small internal affairs office called Lethe. Alex
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  Speaker 1: was recruited to do the watching. From the first page
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  Speaker 1: of the first book, she was a person the institution
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  Speaker 1: had acquired for a specific use. Look at the title.
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  Speaker 1: A deadbeat is someone who doesn't pay what they owe.
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  Speaker 1: Split it into two words, and it turns into something else.
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  Speaker 1: the last beat of a heart. Bardugo puts both meanings
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  Speaker 1: on the cover and the book lives in the space
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  Speaker 1: between them. Somebody always pays. The heart that stops is
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  Speaker 1: rarely the heart that's signed. The best idea in the
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  Speaker 1: novel is its demons. These creatures do not simply kill.
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  Speaker 1: They find a way in through what a person fears
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  Speaker 1: most or through what a person wants most and they
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  Speaker 1: drain the victim through that opening Then they step into
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  Speaker 1: the life that is left and wear it. A dead
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  Speaker 1: woman's apartment and name become a coat. One of them
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  Speaker 1: keeps a classic New England house hung with watercolor seascapes
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  Speaker 1: so carefully bland that they could only belong to something
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  Speaker 1: that has studied how humans try not to offend each other.
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  Speaker 1: Sit with that mechanism for a moment and it starts
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  Speaker 1: to look familiar. An offer arrives through your deepest want.
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  Speaker 1: You accept it. Something feeds on you through the opening
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  Speaker 1: you gave it, and then it occupies your life so
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  Speaker 1: completely that, from the outside, nobody can tell the difference.
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  Speaker 1: That is the demon. It is also, almost beat for beat,
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  Speaker 1: what Yale did to Alex in the first book. It
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  Speaker 1: held out a future she could never have bought, reached
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  Speaker 1: her through her hunger for exactly that future, and asked
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  Speaker 1: for her use in return. Bardugo never draws the line
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  Speaker 1: between the two. She doesn't need to. The rhyme is
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  Speaker 1: too exact to be an accident, and it is the
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  Speaker 1: sharpest thing she has written about the place. There is
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  Speaker 1: an older version of this image, older than dark academia
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  Speaker 1: and older than the societies. Marx, writing about capital, described
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  Speaker 1: it as dead labor that lives only by sucking living labor,
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  Speaker 1: the way a vampire does, and grows stronger the more
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  Speaker 1: it drinks. It is a strange line to have in
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  Speaker 1: your head while reading a fantasy novel with horns and
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  Speaker 1: a love story in it, but Deadbeat keeps inviting it.
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  Speaker 1: One of the threats in the book is a vampire
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  Speaker 1: with roots in the societies themselves. Another member of the
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  Speaker 1: group was turned at the end of the previous volume. Trip,
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  Speaker 1: the rich, sweet, not especially bright legacy boy, is now
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  Speaker 1: hungry in a way he cannot switch off. The book
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  Speaker 1: is crowded with things that live on accumulated life. The
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  Speaker 1: endowment is never named as one of them. It doesn't
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  Speaker 1: have to be. Then there is Darlington. For two books,
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  Speaker 1: he was mostly an absence. He was the golden boy
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  Speaker 1: of Leith and Alex's mentor, the one who knew which
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  Speaker 1: fork to use and which Latin to say. Then he
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  Speaker 1: was lost to hell, and he lived on in her
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  Speaker 1: head as a standard she could never meet. Now he
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  Speaker 1: is back in the flesh, and half of what came
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  Speaker 1: back is not human. He gave up part of himself
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  Speaker 1: to keep the rest, and the book describes him as
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  Speaker 1: both prisoner and warden of what he became. The finale
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  Speaker 1: hands its first chapter to his voice, which is a
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  Speaker 1: real decision. A trilogy that belonged to the girl from
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  Speaker 1: nowhere opens its last act inside the heir of an
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  Speaker 1: old family estate. So the first half of the question
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  Speaker 1: has an answer. Alex paid for the door in blood,
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  Speaker 1: and Darlington paid for it with half of himself. What
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  Speaker 1: the book still owes us is the second half, and
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  Speaker 1: it is the harder one. Who pays for Yale? At
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  Speaker 1: that point, the novel reaches a fork, and it takes
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  Speaker 1: both roads. Yale is the monster in this book, and
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  Speaker 1: Yale is the prize, and Bardugo refuses to let go
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  Speaker 1: of either. That double grip is what makes the last
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  Speaker 1: stretch so uneasy, and it is also the most honest
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  Speaker 1: thing about it. The shape of the book is its
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  Speaker 1: other gambles. It opens on Alex at one decisive moment,
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  Speaker 1: then moves backward to show how everyone got there. Bardugo
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  Speaker 1: has said she wanted an ending that leaves readers hopeful
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  Speaker 1: and still shaken. And the reverse structure is how she
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  Speaker 1: earns the second word. You know the room the story
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  Speaker 1: is heading toward. What you don't know is what it
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  Speaker 1: will cost to walk into it. So every chapter reads
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  Speaker 1: like a line item on that bill. The cast around
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  Speaker 1: Alex has grown into something the first book would not
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  Speaker 1: have allowed. There is the quiet scholar who keeps the
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  Speaker 1: leaf house running, and the detective who wants nothing to
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  Speaker 1: do with magic and keeps showing up anyway. Critics have
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  Speaker 1: compared the setup to a certain television show about a
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  Speaker 1: California girl slaying monsters above a hellmouth, and the comparison
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  Speaker 1: holds as far as it goes. What keeps the book
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  Speaker 1: from feeling borrowed is Bardugo's eye for class. She notices
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  Speaker 1: who wears fleece and who gets to be tired. Alex
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  Speaker 1: hunts demons at night and tries to keep her grades
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  Speaker 1: and her scholarship alive by day, because the one thing
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  Speaker 1: the institution has never offered her is margin. Consider the
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  Speaker 1: people who run Lethe. The board is corrupt, and its
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  Speaker 1: president wears what the book presents as the new uniform
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  Speaker 1: of Wall Street, khakis, and a fleece, with the Yale
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  Speaker 1: Y stitched over the heart. He is dressed for a
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  Speaker 1: hostile takeover followed by a bit of light rock climbing.
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  Speaker 1: It is a wonderful joke. It is also only a joke.
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  Speaker 1: The people who actually own the institution appear in this
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  Speaker 1: novel as satire, while the demons get the teeth. Alex's
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  Speaker 1: roommate sums up the book's philosophy in a single line.
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  Speaker 1: Magic is real, she says, but safe is make-believe. She
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  Speaker 1: is right about everyone in the story, except the men
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  Speaker 1: in fleece. For them, safe is the whole arrangement. And
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  Speaker 1: that is the tension I can't settle. The trilogy's argument
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  Speaker 1: has always been that privilege is a debt paid by
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  Speaker 1: people who never signed the contract, the townies and the dead.
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  Speaker 1: Deadbeat makes that argument more vivid than ever with its demons,
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  Speaker 1: and then spins its emotional energy somewhere else. It worries
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  Speaker 1: about whether the golden boy can be saved and whether
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  Speaker 1: Alex can keep the future the university promised her. Readers
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  Speaker 1: have noticed. One reviewer admitted the romance took up so
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  Speaker 1: much room in her head that she nearly stopped caring
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  Speaker 1: about the plot. That is not a failure of craft.
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  Speaker 1: It is the book telling you what it loves. Compare
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  Speaker 1: it with the novel that founded the genre. In Tart's
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  Speaker 1: The Secret Histories, A circle of beautiful students rationalize a murder,
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  Speaker 1: and the book is half in love with them and
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  Speaker 1: lets that love become the indictment. Bardugo starts from the
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  Speaker 1: opposite corner. Her heroine reads every ritual as one more
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  Speaker 1: rigged game, which is a large part of why the
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  Speaker 1: series felt so fresh in 2019. But three books later,
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  Speaker 1: the rigged game has given Alex a mentor she cannot
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  Speaker 1: let go of and a seat she has blood to keep.
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  Speaker 1: The Outsider has become a member. The book never seems
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  Speaker 1: entirely sure whether that is a victory or a capture.
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  Speaker 1: I think it is a capture. A voluntary one. And
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  Speaker 1: I think the novel is better for not pretending otherwise.
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  Speaker 1: Bardugo knows what it is to love a place that
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  Speaker 1: was built to keep people like her heroine out because
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  Speaker 1: she has room in it. Deadbeat is what that love
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  Speaker 1: looks like when it refuses to look away from the bill.
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  Speaker 1: It cannot stop wanting the house. It just won't let
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  Speaker 1: you forget who paid for the bricks. The demons in
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  Speaker 1: this novel... Come in through the door you most want
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  Speaker 1: to open. That is the cruelest idea in the book
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  Speaker 1: and the truest one. Because it means the wish was
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  Speaker 1: always more dangerous than the fear. A scholarship. A future
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  Speaker 1: with Ivy on it. Everything Alex fought for arrived through
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  Speaker 1: exactly that opening. And the book is wise enough to
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  Speaker 1: let her keep it anyway, and honest enough to make
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  Speaker 1: you uneasy about it. If you like taking books this way,
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  Speaker 1: one at a time, read closely and argued with, follow
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  Speaker 1: the book brief project. The next one is already waiting
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  Speaker 1: on the desk. The back cover borrows a line from
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  Speaker 1: a play four centuries old. Hell is empty, it says,
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  Speaker 1: and all the devils are here. Bardugo means the demons
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  Speaker 1: coming through the door, but picture the bored president in
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  Speaker 1: his khakis, the Y stitched over his heart, walking past
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  Speaker 1: the windowless tombs on his way to a meeting about
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  Speaker 1: who will take the blame. The devils were here long
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  Speaker 1: before the door opened. They just dressed for it.