I loved Naomi Novik’s previous two books, so when I heard that she was about to start a new series I made sure to order the first book right away.
Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education could be called a hybrid of the wizard school and dystopian teenage death match genres, but that would be selling the novel short.
In A Deadly Education, the Scholomance is an academy that educates young people in magic but there are no Hogwarts-like inviting common room couches or delicious feasts to look forward to. It’s a place where you need to inspect your food before eating it and can only shower if you have someone to stand guard. The school is infested with monsters both large and small who are ready to attack at any time.
But it’s not just monsters that you need to look out for. Fellow classmates are also a threat. Only about a quarter of an incoming class survives to graduate, and by graduate, I mean students fighting their way out of a dungeon filled with monsters. Only half the students that enter said graduation hall make it out alive.
Finding alliances with the right students can mean life or death, and there are too many classmates that are willing to kill if it gives them an advantage.
Warning: SPOILERS ahead.
The main character in this story is Galadriel “El” Higgins. She lives on the fringes of her class, she has no close friends, and she never experiences the protection of having grown up in one of the enclaves, or,= communities where wizards live in relative safety.
El grew up in a hippie commune in Wales with her white witch mother. Not only does she have her origins running against her, but El also has the foreboding prophecy that her great-grandmother made. One that says El “would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves” if is not stopped.
Enter Orion Lake.
He’s everything El isn’t. Rich, well connected, and popular. When not surrounded by admirers, he’s saving lives and destroying any monster he comes across. His actions endear him to most of the class, but not to El. She feels that she doesn’t need his help.
This draws Orion to her. He’s sick of people fawning over him and appreciates her honesty. Naturally, their classmates believe that they’ve become an item and wonder what El has done to gain influence over Orion.
El reluctantly uses this to her advantage. It is nice to have people to spend time with, or to do classwork together. Some people think that she’s using dark magic to control Orion, and that’s without them knowing her true nature. El really does has an affinity to cause death and destruction.
In this universe, wizards can have affinities for all sorts of things. Creating spells, building objects, communicating with animals, and so on. The Scholomance creates each student’s curriculum towards their affinity. There are no teachers; instead, all the lessons are generated from out of a void. The spells that appear for El are usually for killing and destroying. But, her mother trained her from a very young age to never use her power to hurt anyone. Throughout the book, El has to fight her impulses to seek revenge every time someone angers her.
El’s efforts seem to pay off as some of her fringe acquaintances develop into real friends and allies who plan how to survive the rest of their time at school. Even Orion isn’t that bad to hang out with, even if his enclave friends are stuck-up and may be plotting to kill her.
But something is off at the school, and El has to step up and take a leadership position to protect the very students that would just as soon push her in front of a threat if it meant saving themselves.
I liked El as a character and can relate to being an outsider. So often characters like Orion would be the protagonist. Characters who have “hero” written all over them. It’s refreshing that El, instead, is the main character, darkness and all.
This book ends with El adjusting to her new place in the class and the grudging respect that she has earned when a juicy cliffhanger arrives in the form of a rare communication bearing a warning that threatens to upend everything that El has begun to build.
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