A Deadly Education

4.5

A solid and unique take on the “Magic School” story.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, lesson one: block off a large block of time when starting this series because you will not want to put it down. Damn, getting sleep and bathing, hell, even food is optional. This book is excellent will grasp you around the neck and hold you tight.

“READER, I RAN the fuck away.”

First off, let me set the scene. The first book of the trilogy, A Deadly Education, introduces us to our protagonist Galadriel and the school called Scholomance. Galadriel's character reminds me of if I took Harry Potter and made the exact opposite of him in every way. If I constantly put him in dangerous situations, and Hogwarts was continually trying to feed him to fluffy the three-headed dog, it would be Galadriel. The only similarity between them is at both of their cores; they have good hearts. But in Galadriel's case, her heart is slightly darker and has terrifying magic and great snark armor.

Scholomance is the wizarding school that Galadriel goes to. The survival rate for Scholomance is around 50%. You do not fail out; you are blown to bits, eaten, have your skin flayed off in strips, or suffer irreparable psychological damage. To graduate, you must run the gauntlet through an obstacle course of creatures from hell all bent on devouring your mind, body, and soul. Surviving Scholomance is just as much about luck and social station as it is skill.

“I love having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful.”

Imagine being a kid; maybe you are a bit shy or gawky. Perhaps you come from humble beginnings. Now imagine that your ability to survive Scholomance is almost certainly on your family's wealth or your power to be a suck-up. If you aren't good enough at it, you will probably get eaten by the demons that roam the sacred halls. In Galadriel's case, everyone hates her or is unnerved by her. They know something is off, dark queen vibes. What they don't know is that Galadriel has an immense amount of power. The kind that flattens cities and makes people slaves. Except that all she wants to be is left alone and not hurt anyone. How does she survive her junior year without hurting anyone and not being eaten alive by the evils that roam the halls?

It has been a long time since I read something as engaging as this story. I adored El, her snark, and her heart. She wants people to leave her alone, and short of yelling at them to “get off my lawn,” people won't leave her be. And things keep getting more complicated. There is a boy who is a confusion to her. People start gravitating towards her and maybe want to be friends. What is this friend nonsense?

Novik did an excellent job in crafting the characters and the school. You want to know them; there is enough teenageness to believe they are young adults grappling with hormones and who they are. But enough realism that they understand that the school and the demon-like creatures will eat them.

Pick up this book and get sucked in.

I'm surprised to give this book 5 stars. On reflection, I don't know that the craft of it is excellent, nor was the plot particularly interesting or filled with varying points. That said, I was truly brought into the universe—or at least fascinated by it. I cared about the main Character, similar in my mind to Quentin at the beginning of the magicians. I enjoyed the world that was built.

I consumed this book extremely quickly by my standards and found myself really enjoying it, but I really and honestly can't say why. Maybe I just enjoy magical school settings and surly main characters? Anyway, I'll probably recommend this to you.

This book makes me realise that I don't particullay like romance in romance books. But romance in fantasy books where they're both about to die and its an enemy to lovers. YES just YES

Oh man. I didn't really have a good time with this book. It started off with a really interesting premise but I thought the storytelling got lost with a ton of infodumps. The main character was kinda spunky and held her own, but also seemed to be mired in this “look at how massively unpopular I am” mode for more than three-quarters of the book, which got rather grating after a bit.

The book is centered around a school, the Scholomance, which is some kind of... weird building of concentric circles put together by magic where it rotates students' dormitories down a level every year. By the time they're seniors and ready to graduate, the students find themselves in the lowest level and the center of the whole building, the graduation hall, where they have to fight their way past a horde of dark magic monsters to get to the exit and leave the school. It's kind of like Hunger Games meets Harry Potter.

While this sounds nice in theory, the world building was a little too complex imo. Even when I was more than halfway through, I still wasn't completely sure what the different magic sources - mana and malia - were, or what the difference was between the two types of mages, artificers and malificers. It seemed like every chapter or so our protagonist Galadriel (because of course she's named Galadriel) goes on another info dump about what an enclave is, what the classes are like, what the school cliques means, what this and that is. Because it's also told from a first person perspective, the story always feels like someone trying to tell you some juicy gossip that went down, but then keeps interrupting their own story with a ton of backstory and explanations that ruins the momentum. It felt like a lot happens but also doesn't happen in this book. A simple conversation might take pages to complete because it's interspersed with so much information.

There's a ton of action, don't get me wrong, and there's a lot of death and violence. A bit too much to the point where I felt like a lot of killings were just there for the shock factor and it all began to feel a bit meaningless after a while. It certainly felt that way to the students in the book, where people die around them like flies and they don't even blink an eye, so why should I? It also felt like such a weird world that probably wouldn't really work. How on earth are people supposed to work on essays and attend classes when they are looking over their shoulders literally every second of the day trying to make sure they don't get eaten up or killed by the next monster, and can't get a night's rest unless they have enough magic to charge up a ward around their beds/rooms? And even more so the student next door might be the ones murdering them? It sounds cool but I couldn't suspend my disbelief that far.

I took a break from this one to read another book which was more depressing and I wasn't a huge fan of (Wuthering Heights), but when I finished it and came back to this, I actually found myself less engaged here. By the end of the book, I was kinda skimming because I just wanted to get the book over and done with so I can tick it off my TBR. I didn't particularly care for any of the characters, and certainly not the main character even though we spend a lot of time with her and knowing her backstory.

It's a shame because I've read and enjoyed Uprooted and Spinning Silver also by Novik, and this one had a super intriguing premise but I just couldn't really get into it.

This book is weird.
It is missing something - which I refer to as ‘charm' but I am not sure that is quite right.

A Deadly Education follows El (short for Galadriel) who is in her junior year at the magic school Sholomance. The school is a highly hazardous place. There are murderous creatures out to kill El and all her classmates, and even if you make it to graduation, there's an all-out bloodbath waiting for you when you try to leave the school grounds.

In reality this would make for a very depressing book (something like Attack on Titan comes to mind) but the book sidesteps this and it's actually more humorous than anything, because it's so absurd. The school provides spells to students in languages that they are familiar with, so El spends all her time studying different languages to try and get all the spells that she can.

I was originally a bit hesitant to read this since it's considered YA, but El is quite a flawed character and this book doesn't veer too close to the “chosen one” trope so I finished it pleasantly surprised.

I love Naomi Novik a lot, and her writing style is great, but premise-wise this book just wasn't for me. It's sort of a fun twist on the magical school genre, but it's still at its heart a magical school book with teen drama and regular monster attacks, something I might enjoy as a tv show, but that just doesn't work for me in a book. If you're into magical school drama, this is probably a great choice for you, but I'm hoping she returns to her eastern European historical fantasies soon.

Probably the weakest Naomi Novik I've read so far. I much prefer her fairytale retellings. This felt very repetitive. However, I probably will read the next in the series for THAT ending. WTF??

Um, I love this trilogy. A sentient school that wants to eat the magical students trapped in it, and a main character foretold to become a dark sorceress and doing everything in her power not to become that, picking up friends and a love interest along the way. Darkly funny, and I love that it goes into the themes of institutional power and the consequences of doing bad things to outsiders to benefit the insiders. A+

Books set in fantasy schools are always so much fun to read. I'm not sure whether its just more relatable or whether there's something else to it but they get me into a good mood.

A Deadly Education was a really solid young adult fantasy novel. The setting of a school that's trying to kill the students was pretty unique and I appreciated the main character El a ton. She felt super relatable and her thoughts, actions, and emotions were all befitting her character and growth. She had a great arc through the book and it was super satisfying to see her progress.

It felt great to be thrown headfirst into the world but I did feel like there was a ton of exposition to set up the world in the beginning. I feel like that was necessary for the young adult tag but other than that I think the book was pretty mature. El's thoughts about her classmates felt really tied to the way I felt about college and it definitely felt more relatable in reflection rather than living through it. Other than that, my only issue with the book was that El sometimes explained too much and sometimes it didn't feel earned for the reader. I'm definitely going to speed through the next book when it comes out.

I liked this book much more than I thought I would! The magic world in this book is really creepy and dangerous and intense. This is a world in which for many people it would be way better to not have magic, because if you do you have to go to this magic school and the odds of actually graduating (read: surviving) are like 1/10. I don't know that I'd be able to make it through the crucible! I also like how this is a send-up of Harry Potter and other teen fantasy novels with a Mary Sue/Gary Stu protagonist who can do no wrong and is always at the center of things.

A Deadly Education: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 1) by Naomi Novik

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2AJ9CJR3O46ZF?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

There are problems with this story, but I found it to be so thoroughly enjoyable and novel that I willing to be flexible with my “willing suspension of disbelief” meter not to mark this book down on those problems.

This is a dark, dark YA urban fantasy. In this world, there are magic users hidden in the world. The elite of this group lives in “enclaves” in various cities. These enclaves appear to be fortress-like structures where wizards band together to mutually protect themselves from “maleficaria” or “mals.” Mals are evil bits of wizardry alchemically or artificially produced to become autonomous and filled with a need to eat wizards for the magical power, aka “mana,” they possess.

Mals particularly like younger wizards. In the external world, 19 out of 20 wizardly children never make it to adulthood because of mal attacks. Wizard society, therefore, developed the “Scholomance” which is an educational facility built-in “the Void,” separated from the world. Wizards send their children to this facility at age 14. They stay there until they graduate four years later. There are no adults at the Scholoamance. Instead, the Scholomance doles out lesson plans and food and provides negative motivations for failure to study.

It's a weird system with no mentors, no models of behavior, and no going outside.

There are mals, though, since they can get in through the gates where the Seniors graduate. Fortunately, the protective nature of the Scholomance ups the survival rate of the young from 5% to roughly 25%.

The main character is Galadriel (“El”). The school has decided that she has an affinity for death and destruction and is therefore giving her lesson plans based on mass destruction and torture. She is a dark person but has an uncorrupted core that doesn't want to be a dark wizard. When the chips are down, she's personally courageous and self-sacrificing, but no one knows it because the school seems to want to deny her the satisfaction of being known as a good person.

There is a Harry Potter figure in the story, who is Galadriel's foil. This is Orion Lake, who is authentic hero material. Orion rushes around destroying Mals and saving the lives of his classmates. Unfortunately, this has starved the Mals, making the ones waiting for the graduating seniors in the graduation hall more fearsome, suggesting that an epic wipe-out waits for the seniors.

The story starts with El as an unknown loser junior being saved to her disgust by Orion, again. El knows that she is powerful and she knows that she has to earn a reputation as powerful if she hopes to form a graduation alliance to get past the horrific mals waiting for her class the year after next. Orion's heroism wrecks her plan and she lets Orion know that he is not welcome. Orion, naturally for what is effectively a kind of romance, finds her caustic character to be fetching. The story follows the two of them through the rest of the school year and the trials and tribulations of the Scholomance. Orion and El are not “item,” although they are thought of that way by others.

The book is exciting and adventurous and thoroughly acquaints the reader with this interesting magical world. A drawback is that a lot of this development is through El's introspective reflections. She's kind of “b*tchy,” but, then, she has reasons to be that way. I might have taken a star off for this, but I thought the rest of the story compensated.

I found two things interesting. First, is the class war aspect of the story. The Enclaves have the power, even in the Scholomance. Outside the Enclaves, life is hard. Non-enclave children were allowed into the Scholomance to provide the Enclave children with cannon fodders and servants.

Second, the Scholomance environment manages to create a student body of Slytherins. Some young wizards gain power by murdering their classmates; others get better rooms by murdering their classmates. Sometimes the obvious thing for seniors to do is to break down a wall so that the Mals in the Graduation Hall can break into the Scholomance and murder the freshmen. That way the really fearsome Mals will be otherwise occupied while the Seniors make their dash for graduation.

This is not Hogwarts.

DNF @ chapter 5. I tried so hard but I just could not finish this book. El pisses me off. The story telling is boring. I don't care about any of the characters, and it feels like there is no plot. I'm so disappointed, I was so excited for this one.

I found it hard to take breaks from this book it's very face paced and intense. It's a very dark story and the only comparison to Harry Potter that I can pick up is the setting in a wizard school. Maybe.. Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies.

3.75 stars
I am intrigued enough to want the second book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, much different that the “Temeraire” books in the past. It does get a bit exhausting to see how the students of the Scholomance have to always protect themselves. But that's the thing, I FEEL the anxiety of it all which makes it a good thing, I guess. El is a character after my own heart with her snark, self awareness and her impatience with all things associated with selfishness of those around her. Looking forward to the next book!

3.5

Excuse me, but... WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS WITH THAT CLIFF-HANGER AT THE END? That killed me. I've heard people talk about the ending of this book and how it was really UGH but that left me with so many questions and I'm trying to figure out some possible situations, but I just can't.

This book is really awesome, the idea is truly unique and I enjoyed it a lot. The Scholomance is a school for people gifted with magic, but it's not an usual school. It wants to kill its students, there are threats to their lives at every step and the monsters that lurk in the hallways are no joke. Everyone knows that they must do anything in order to survive, and that's exactly what our main character, Galadriel El, is trying to do.

This book is her journey through her sophomore year and how she tries not to give in to her really strong magic, a magic so powerful that could make her graduation easy, but she might kill the other students and that's not something El wants. She's a good person and she doesn't use magic in a bad way, she doesn't hurt other beings (besides the monsters), but the problem is that all her powerful spells include mass-destruction.

I had fun reading about El and all the awesome (and creepy) things happening at the Scholomance. Her bedroom and the black wall (the void) that's inside every students' bedroom. Her making friends with people who used to avoid her. Slowly falling in love with a guy she despised at first. How she tried to save the world.

And back to that ending, I cannot wait to read the next book and see what that was about!

This was a perfectly good book. I've read the bad reviews, I've read the book. I enjoyed it. Please try reading the book once before forming opinions based on other people's reviews. There's a high rated 1 star review that isn't entirely accurate.

—Minor spoilers in review—

• We had the soft boy/snarky girl trope in this and I loved it. It was hilarious!

This was probably one of the best books I read of 2020. It reminded me of Harry Potter meets Percy Jackson. The story follows Elle, an outsider who has had to work hard for everything in life, through her “high school” academic years. Sounds potentially problematic, right? What with the social anxiety, no friends, bullies, etc..... well add in trying not to die. That's right, in this ‘Hogwarts' the castle school is literally trying to kill you so it can have energy to function. Not everyone who starts makes it out.

The plot in this book was absolutely outstanding. Everything about it was unique, so well thought through and thoroughly original. I hung on every word (I listened via audiobook), and was totally mesmerized by the ongoing twists and turns. The author painted such a vivid portrait with every scene and there was just so much to digest. I am SOOOO happy this is planned to be a trilogy!! I can hardly wait. If anyone is debating, PLEASE READ it was one of the best books I've ever read. And that is saying a lot, because ya girl HATES YA!!

I just couldn't get into the main character, El's, long-winded and negative narrative. All the characters in this book are unlikeable and whiny. I got halfway through this book and realized I just didn't care what happens. This is one series I will not continue.

Books, Coffee & Passion
2.5 stars
The first chapters were a lot. Lengthy info dumping, I felt like I was thrown into a dark, creepy world school with a blindfold. I think it would make more sense if the book started at their first year, because the readers would be learning about the school along with El instead of getting so many lengthy info dumping randomly.

I started to enjoy the book when El's interactions with Orion were more frequent. The sort of frenemies relationship they had was great and I really liked it.
El's somewhat friendship/alliance with Adhya and Liu was another entertaining aspect of the story.
The creepy, dark school setting was amazing and complex.

Additionally, after inserting so many diverse characters and enclaves, it's very underwhelming how there was little effort to flesh out the multicultural characters and/or aspects. And there were a few paragraphs that definitely made me uncomfortable: the dreadlocks paragraph which in my opinion didn't add anything to the plot or the world building and another paragraph about an Arabic worksheet that was tone deaf to the core.

I was not a fan of the conversational style of writing, all that inner monologue/narration filled with random information kept distracting me from what was going on. In spite of that, the ending was very intriguing and I'm tempted to continue the series.

It was very fun