Review of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik and the rest of the Scholomance trilogy, including The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclave. Why would you send your children to a magic school where multiple students die every single year? Where as many as a fourth of the students die? That’s the question that sparked the setting for the Scholomance series.
Review of the Scholomance trilogy
It is extremely rare that I reread a book within five years of reading it the first time, so the fact that I reread the The Golden Enclaves just 8 months after reading it the first time, should tell you just how much I liked the Scholomance thrilogy.
I really recommend the whole Scholomance thrilogy, if you are interested in magical school books at all.
The setting
Wizard children gets eaten by monsters, if they are not protected, magical teenagers even more so. So in an effort to protect their children, so parents send them to the Scholomance, a boarding school where they will learn to use their magic and where there are fewer monsters around. But the school has not teachers and it is extremely dangerous. They then try to graduate after four years, which is hazardous as well, not because of terrible exams, but because of those monsters.
Review of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
I really enjoyed A Deadly Education. The protagonist El is kinda the anti-chosen one and has a dark prophecy hanging over her head. Everyone expect her to be the villain, but she works so hard not to become one, even when her life would be so much easier if she just let her dark powers loose. I like that the book plays with the chosen one trope.
A Deadly Education is also a story about privilege and the unfair playing field in education, where the underprivileged students have to work twice as hard to get half as good opportunities.
My review of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Title: A Deadly Education
Author: Naomi Novik
Series: Scholomance, book 1
Genre: Fantasy, magic school, contemporary fantasy
Themes: Privilege, friendship, loneliness, unequal opportunities, learning magic
I love magic school stories and I like Novik’s writing, so when she announced that she was doing a dark magic school, I preordered it the same day. And it did not disappoint.
Opening sentence
“I DECIDED that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.”
I love reading about how people learn a trade, and if that is a magical trade, that is all the more exciting to me. It fascinates me to read about magical education. And the take on how the learning is done is pretty different in A Deadly Education, while still being very relatable.
The protagonist El
El is not what you would call a likeable character. She is spiky and angry and push people away, because of a lifetime of being an outsider in any situation. She literally have bad vibes that people pick up on. She is very aware of how unfair privilege is while trying to gain power herself. She very much see herself as misunderstood, but also knows why people see her that way. I kinda like grumpy tenagers better than whiny teenagers and I actually quite liked her as a character, but she turns a lot of people off the book.
El is kinda the anti-chosen one and has a dark prophecy hanging over her head. She works very hard not to have this prophecy be fulfilled, even though her life would be so much easier if she would let herself be a villain and let her dark powers loose. I like that the book plays with the chosen one trope.
“It’s always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real. Dignity was what I had instead of friends.”
El is a very lonely girl, who never had anyone but her mother love her. She dares not hope for friendship or even kindness, so she looks for ulterior motives in everyone around her. She does however very slowly building a group of allies, that takes a chance with her, much to her surprise.
The worldbuilding and magic system
There is a lot of worldbuilding frontloaded in the first book as El reflect on the world and explain it to the reader (first person narrative). I found the world fascinating, so I didn’t mind but it does mean that the first half is pretty slow going. The story gets very tender at times. El want to poke all new relationships to have the break now rather than later. It does make it hard to like her, but it is also really entertaining to watch.
The magic system is never fully explained but it makes internal sense in the plot and I don’t mind a magic system on the softer side of thing, as magic is never the real solution to any of El’s actual problems. She is extremely powerful, when it comes to dark magic, so she can always just kill things. Her problems evolve around finding other solutions to her problem than just killing everyone around her – which is refreshing. I really enjoyed that the way they build mana is though misery or life force – that is a very interesting concept.
A Deadly Education is also a story about privilege and the unfair playing field in education, where the underprivileged students have to work twice as hard to get half as good opportunities.
I really enjoyed the dry wit and the grumpy bather between characters.
The tone is pretty dark and grim with little glimmers of hope and friendship. There are some quite violent scenes where children har horribly killed (almost cartoon violence).
The stats: A Deadly Education
Published: 2020 by Del Rey
Read: 11 December 2020 & 15 June 2023
Author: Female, white, USA
The protagonists: Female cis-teenager, bisexual, half Welsh half Indian. Wizard school student.
Review of The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
I lost sleep over The Last Graduate! I just could not put it down. It’s an emotional ride and it does not care if you want of. Just keep your hands inside the ride at all times. It is very much a book about trust and friendship.
My review of The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
Title: The Last Graduate, book 2
Themes: Privilege, friendship, loneliness, unequal opportunities, trust, teamwork
I really like the writing style and the voice of El:
“Once through the gates, we’ll be carving our dreams into the world like gleeful vandals scratching graffiti on the pyramids, and we won’t look behind us.”
The world of the Scholamancy is very much a low trust environment because of the extreme pressures that the students are under combined with their upbringing that always stresses that everyone must look out for them self. Nobody does anyone any favours just to be nice, everything is always a trade or you expect a favour in return.
“That didn’t make them grotesquely selfish; it just made them people.”
This book is very much about building trust and learning to work together, when it is easier to just keep on being distrustful. It is very much a story about teamwork and hope. There are some wonderful training and work montages.
El keep very begrutioning wiring the group of people she cares about, much to her displeasure. Orion gets to play a much bigger role in The Last Graduate, again much to El’s displeasure. She doesn’t want to care for people, as they can be weakness and she does not want to care for them, as she will then want to save them.
“I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway.”
In this second book the Scholomance itself becomes an active character, which is also really interesting.
Even on a second read I lost sleep to The Last Graduate because the pacing is so effective. it is also just a very readable book. On this second read I read it in 2½ day.
The stats: The Last Graduate
Published: 2021 by Del Rey
Read: 30 September 2021 & 18 June 2023
Review of The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
The Golden Enclaves asks what are you willing to pay for safety? How much of other people’s suffering are you willing to tolerate in order to have a good life?
The Golden Enclaves somehow manages to be both dark and fill of grief and hopeful at the same time.
My review of The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
Title: The Golden Enclaves, book 3
Themes: Power, privilege, security, grief, power, friendship
The Golden Enclaves asks what are you willing to pay for safety? How much of other people’s suffering are you willing to tolerate in order to have a good life? What is the price for your good life? It is a book about what moral and practical compromises you are willing to make. What do you choose to use your power for?
The Golden Enclaves is very much a book full of grief both for people you have lost and a life you do not get to have. It is also a book about community and about found family. El gets to have more than one romantic relationship in this series and it does not treat sex as something secret, but rather takes a sex positive stance, which I really appreciate. There is absolutely not slut shaming here. The sex scenes that are here are not graphic, but do not fade to black either. That said, this is very much not a romance – even if parts of the book is quite romantic.
The stats: The Golden Enclaves
Published: 2022 by Del Rey
Read: 8 November 2022 & 29 June 2023
And yes Kari, I will get around to reading Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko. It has been years since you recommended it to me, but I have not been in the head space for reading something actually dark.
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