Leigh Bardugo is looking back at a conversation-starting chapter of her career.
The author rose to fame with her sprawling Grishaverse YA novels, set in a magical world. In 2019, she made her adult debut with “Ninth House,” the first book in a trilogy that unfolds among the secret societies of Yale.
At the time of its publication, a graphic assault scene in “Ninth House” sparked a discussion about content warnings. Some readers said they were shocked and disturbed by the scene and that there should have been a warning before reading.
On an episode of Jenna Bush Hager’s “Open Book with Jenna” out Oct. 1, Bardugo said the uproar is “still surprising” to her, “given some of the things that are popular now.”
“There was nothing in this book that really deviated from what you would find in any horror novel or urban fantasy novel, but it was a departure from what I had written for teens,” she said.
Bardugo said while there’s “an argument to be made” for content warnings, she noted that calls for them tend to be loudest for books written by women who previously wrote books for kids.
“I think there’s a very puritanical streak that runs through all this,” she said.
She also said if content warnings are expected, they need to be in every book, “and I’m not interested in being the test case.”
“I believe that things belong on different shelves,” she said. “That where we shelve a book is all about expectations. And if you are coming to a young adult shelf, you would never find ‘Ninth House’ there.”
Bardugo said her first impulse was to be defensive over the backlash to her book’s content. “I didn’t write this for shock value,” she remembered thinking.
Then, she realized the outrage was proof the book was working.
“You should be troubled by this. If you’re reading about an assault on the page. You shouldn’t just be able to skim right past it. It should hit you. It should hit you like a ton of bricks. And if I did that, maybe I did something right,” she said.
Ultimately, she said, the book “found the people it needed to find.” If she had changed or softened its contents, “it would not have found those people.”
Plus, she said, books are an excellent place to raise difficult and uncomfortable topics, “because you’re safe when you’re doing it.”
“(Books) can lead to conversation. They can lead to difficult thoughts that we have about things we’ve been through, things that we’re going through with other people, things that our friends have been through, that maybe we don’t know how to speak to them about. That kind of connection exists in these places of discomfort,” she says.
The final installment of Bardugo’s “Ninth House” series, called “Dead Beat,” came out Sept. 15, wrapping up Alex Stern’s voyage through the magical portals of Yale University.
