Galaxy 'Alex' Stern

Alex Stern — also known as Galaxy — is the protagonist of Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House series — a Yale freshman with the rare ability to see Grays (the ghosts of the dead) who is recruited by Lethe House, the secret Yale society tasked with monitoring the other ancient secret societies on campus and their use of dangerous magic. A survivor of a traumatic past involving drugs and violence, Alex brings to the rarefied world of Yale a perspective and a resilience that its institutional culture cannot accommodate or contain.

Bardugo writes Ninth House as a significant departure from her Grishaverse work — darker, more explicitly adult, more interested in class and institutional power than in adventure. Alex's working-class background and her complicated history with the supernatural world make her an outsider at Yale in multiple simultaneous ways, and the novel is as interested in the violence of elite institutions as in the literal supernatural violence she investigates.

The Ninth House series engages seriously with sexual violence, addiction, and the specific ways that institutions protect their own at the expense of vulnerable people — Bardugo handles this material with unflinching honesty.

Begin with Ninth House (2019) and continue with Hell Bent.