What an excellent imaginative book!! Enjoyed so much getting into some autumnal dark academia fantasy which isn’t my usual genre , but I just had such a good time reading this. It’s so hard to write magic + ghost stories in an original way but Bardugo does it so well here, I loved how the grays were imagined & I loved the insidious nature of the houses, coupled with critiques on class + the dangers of the patriarchy, was a really nice pairing thematically + I loved Alex’s hero arc and how she is almost an antihero , it felt like a narrative that’s typically reserved for male protagonists and it was nice to see. Overall just had a good time & now I’m maybe going to read more Leigh Bardugo but we’ll see!