This got better as it went along, but generally it just didn't manage to hold my interest very well at all; the characters were mostly one-note, the backstory wasn't explained clearly, and it mostly seemed to be the same thing over and over. ( )

I’ve heard this book compared to Harry Potter, mostly because it’s a magic school, so I’ll make a HP comparison: A Deadly Education is hundreds of Slytherins and one Gryffindor stuck in an underground bunker where they have to survive monster attacks every single day while learning magic. Once a student enters the Scholomance, they cannot leave until graduation and all they have is what they brought with them. This means that everything has a price, and everything can be recycled into something else. There is no such thing as kindness in the Scholomance, everything is about survival, alliances, and getting ahead.

The magic system is interesting and thorough. Mana is built by human effort and can be stored to be used later. Malia is dark magic and takes no effort, but it steals life from things (and people) around it. This system sets up a class divide between those students who are part of an enclave and enter the Scholomance as a group. Their enclave ensures they have what they need going into the bunker and they have a shared magic store that any of them can draw on. They also have a safety in numbers that doesn’t cost them anything in return and an ensured future ahead of them once they graduate.

Galadriel, or El, doesn’t have any connection to an enclave and must barter and scheme her way through school. She’s incredibly powerful, but her affinity is for dark magic and while others cheat with dark magic, she can’t because she would end up killing people around her. El is a hard-edged angry individual and while I can’t say that I liked her, I was interested enough to follow her. The side characters and how El grows to care for them is my favorite part of the story. In between all the fighting monsters and scheming there are some emotions other than anger and those are the moments that made this book.

My main complaint about the book is how much telling is going on. This is a complex magic system and a very detailed world, so it’s understandable. But so much of the book was El just explaining things to the reader and it did get bogged down. The characters were also very much “types” and sometimes character actions, especially El’s, got to be annoying. We know you’re angry! Can you maybe make logical choices anyway! That being said, the moments when El becomes more nuanced were worth waiting for, they just were few and far in-between until the last third of the book. The last third of the book is what turned it from a 3-star to a 3.5-star that I felt like rounding up. Both of the issues mentioned I hope will smooth out in the second book since the world and characters are established.

Despite my issues, this was a fun, monster-filled read. A Deadly Education is exactly the book my teenage self would have loved, and there is some nostalgia to reading such an angry protagonist and monster violence in a book. Although it doesn’t quite line up with my tastes anymore, I read it quickly and couldn’t wait to find out what happened. I’ll definitely be reading the second book when it comes out.

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review. ( )

1st read: October 2020
2nd read: October 2021

A Deadly Education is one of my all-time favorite books. I love it even more after reading it for the second time. I hope The Last Graduate is just as good.
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A Deadly Education is an instant favorite for me.

The characters are great, especially El. El is both tough and sensitive. Her thoughts are by turns, funny, pragmatic, and heart wrenching. She's been through a lot and she is still an amazing person who I want good things for.

The writing is great, not flowery or overly descriptive. The world is interesting and in-depth, even with the story being exclusively in a school. I enjoyed it start to finish and I can't wait to read the next book in the series. ( )

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
(Print: 9/29/2020; 978-0316272476; Hachette Books; 336 pages )
(Digital: Yes.)
Audio: 9/29/2020; 9780593287422; Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group; Duration 11:06:06 (11 parts); Unabridged.
(Film: No).

SERIES:
Scholomancer Book 1

CHARACTERS: (not comprehensive)
Galadriel (El) Higgins – Student at a school of magic
Orion Lake – Particularly popular fellow student
Aadhya – Fellow student
Jack Westing – Fellow student
Liu – Fellow student
Chloe– Fellow student

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
This was another book I selected from a Goodreads annual list of top reads. I’m not generally a fan of fantasy, but wanted to try genres that I normally wouldn’t, to be sure I wasn’t missing something. I liked the underlying story of someone who has lead a difficult childhood and feels like a misfit and still has the fortitude to stand on her own without trying to garner favor by any means possible. But, overall, while I’ve no doubt that this book is great for it’s audience, for me—an obnoxious protagonist, too many monsters and too many battles spells: not-so-much.

AUTHOR:
Naomi Novik (4/30/1973). According to Wikipedia, Naomi is “an American author of speculative fiction. Novik won both the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 2016 for her novel Uprooted.[1][2] Her novel Spinning Silver won the American Library Association's Alex Award in 2019,[3] the 2019 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel,[4] and the 2019 Audie Award for Fantasy.[5] Spinning Silver was a 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel Nominee, a 2018 finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and a 2019 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fantasy.[6] Other novels by Novik were nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2007, 2016, and 2019.[7]

Of her best-selling Temeraire fantasy series, the first book, His Majesty's Dragon, won the 2007 Compton Crook Award for best first novel in the science fiction and fantasy category.[8]”
NARRATOR(S): Anisha Dadia. According to IMDb, “Anisha Dadia is known for her work on Linda LeThorn & the Musicbox (2012), Team Toon (2013) and Dead of Night (2013).”

GENRE:
Magic School Fantasy; Epic Fantasy, Dark Fantasy

LOCATIONS:
Magic School

TIME FRAME:
Current

SUBJECTS:
Magic spells for killing monsters, Magic spells for chores, Magic books, School life

NARRATIVE STYLE:
First person

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter 1: Soul-Eater
“I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would’ve been all right if he’d saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so—thirteen is a number of distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could have lived with that. But we’d been in the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn’t shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment.
Selfish of me, you’ll say, to be contemplating with murderous intent the hero responsible for the continued survival of a quarter of our class. Well, too bad for the losers who couldn’t stay afloat without his help. We’re not meant to all survive anyway. The school has to be fed somehow.
Ah, but what about me, you ask, since I needed him to save me? Twice, even? And that’s exactly why he had to go. He set off the explosion in the alchemy lab last year, fighting that chimaera. I had to dig myself out of the rubble while he ran around in circles whacking at its fire-breathing tail. And that soul-eater hadn’t been in my room for five seconds before he came through the door: he must have been right on its heels, probably chasing it down the hall. The thing had only swerved in here looking to escape.”

RATING:
3 stars.

STARTED-FINISHED
4/20/21-5/3/21 ( )

I feel like Naomi Novik saw all those memes about Hogwarts being an absurdly dangerous place for the students and thought: “Well, what if it’s even more dangerous school but at the same time the safest place they can be?”

Now let me be clear. This is not me comparing it to Harry Potter because honestly, besides both having magic school, there aren’t really similarities.

Why people attend this murderous school is best to be discovered bit by bit, so I am not going to talk much about the story. While important, I think this book is more about the characters. Especially our main character Galadriel grows a lot through this book. In the first chapter, I didn’t like her much. I was thinking, how am I going to enjoy this book when she is such a bitch? Constantly being rude. BUT, I think her behaviour is explained quite well and you slowly discover that there is more to her than it seems at first sight. She definitely became one of my favourite protagonists, especially after that one library scene...

And then this outsider girl gets entangled with the popular guy and the resulting relationship again became one of my favourite ones. We get such different personalities and the ways they deal with life in this murderous school, that the exchanges are sometimes super hilarious.

Then we get the magic. I especially loved that each person has a certain affinity for class/type of magic. It really makes for very different approaches to fighting/surviving. Also, the spells are in different languages, so depending on where the student is from, they can also have some very different kind of spells. It’s all quite complex and quite a fresh take on what could at first glance look like your usual incantation magic.

The magic school itself is certainly a thing to talk about. It is in a way this AI that tries to prepare students by making it for them as hard as possible. You accidentally read some foreign word in the library? I am so glad that you chose to study a new language! I will now give you class work and spells in it. You better learn it fast, or you will be stuck not learning anything new.

And what is the danger? Monsters. Creepy hard to imagine monsters that develop the best strategies to get some people eaten. Again, just thinking about that library scene... that was nightmare fuel. Like I am not sure I would even want to see an adaptation if it ever came out.

Now for some negatives in this review. I can only think of one.
We learn and are repeatedly told there is like 4000 students in this school but then our characters keep having problems with going some places alone and looking for others to accompany them. Wouldn’t many groups aim for the same place at one time? Why is the school so empty, I know it’s big but still... Yeah, I didn’t really feel like there were so many students. Even the classes seemed quite small from descriptions. Sometimes it felt like the actual number of students there was bit of an afterthought.

If you want a book with murderous school and scary monsters but at the same time enjoy MCs snarky commentary and hilarious situations, this is one for you. ( )