The Last Graduate

The series starts picking up in this one for sure. With most of the world already established, I felt there was more room for plot, action, suspense than the first book. The lead up to graduation feels well paced and I enjoyed how it evolved. Once we get to the climax it all feels very earned and a nice suspense built up. El's really starts to evolve & bloom as well. She's still sassy, but the heart grows along with our understanding of her core

The Last Graduate is the second book in the Scholomance trilogy. I had really enjoyed the first book during this summer, and I was looking forward to continuing this series (before I forgot everything that happened in the first book)!

The second installment was also quite enjoyable! I think middle-of-series books are harder to make more interesting - you're not fully in world-building mode, and you can't quite bring everything to a nice conclusion. However, my two favorite characters (the snarky, loner protagonist and the equally sarcastic school itself) both were able to continue to grow as characters, and able to throw a few curve balls as well. Both book one and book two end on cliffhangers, so I'm really glad that I started this series after it was finished because boy would I be mad if I had to wait to find out what happens next! I have a few other books in line but I think the third installment in this series will find its way into my hand relatively quickly.

YA with snark.

Orion, tell me you did not just do that. I mean, I knew you would, but I'm still mad about it.
I had a great time reading this. It's just fun. I like that El is so cranky, and I like that Orion gets giddy when El lets something romantic happen, even though he's hardwired to be a mal-killing machine. It's just fun, y'all.
Most of the book is just training, which can get a little tedious, but because we're constantly moving towards new goals, the story doesn't go stale.

A satisfying sequel in this fun series of YA fantasy. Some lengths, especially when describing enclave politics outside the school. One scene of teenagers awkwardly fumbling towards their first sexual encounter that was cringeworthy, and that I could have done without.

I just can't with the extra, unnecessary, distracting text. It's way too much.

I HATE THE ENDING. WATCH ME BURN THIS BOOK.
I BEEN SUFFERING READING IT TO GET TO THIS?!

I could barely put it down!!

  I spent a lot of my review of A Deadly Education (this book's predecessor) talking about how good the book felt and looked.  I will start out this review by saying that everything I said there regarding the aesthetics and feel of A Deadly Education holds for The Last Graduate.  The book looks amazing and feels wonderful to read on a purely physical sense.  With that out of the way let's get into the contents of The Last Graduate.    While the physical quality of The Last Graduate matches its predecessor, the actual text does not.  It's still a good book that will treat any fans of the first, but it doesn't feel like a true groundbreaking work the way the first book did.  If I had to point out one failure in The Last Graduate, it's that it doesn't introduce enough new things to justify its existence as a standalone novel.  Sequels can sometimes be hard to write because the intrigue of exploring a new world isn't there for a sequel the way it is for the first book in a series.  Typically authors get around this issue by simply expanding upon the ideas and concepts introduced in the first book.  The Last Graduate does not use this method nearly enough to keep the book fresh.  Like A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate takes place entirely within The Scholomance.  The Scholomance remains an awesome setting for a book, but it's a lot less intriguing when you know all about it.  Part of what made A Deadly Education so fun was learning about the weird tricks of the Scholomance.  This feeling of excitement naturally doesn't exist to nearly the same degree here.     I don't mean to make it sound like The Last Graduate is totally pointless.  Many plot threads from its predecessor are picked up and furthered in satisfying ways.  The main thing I'm talking about here is the El-Orion relationship, but plenty of other relationships are further explored.  We also see some legitimate growth from El, which is very fun to see.  The final chapters are also legitimately breathtaking up until the very last sentence (which perfectly sets up the conclusion of the trilogy).  There's definitely some good stuff here.    Ultimately The Last Graduate fails to live up to the lofty expectations set by its predecessor.  It's far from a bad book, it just left me wanting for more. 

Almost a 4!

This one didn't grab me like the first one. But damn did it hook me with that ending. Dammit.

4 stars for the book, 4 stars for the series. Much better then the first book, and starts answering questions from book 1.

The Last Graduate
Naomi Novik

CAWPILE SCORE
C-8
A-9
W-8
P-8
I-8
L-8
E-9
TOTAL-8.29/10

CAWPILECharactersEl- wants to be wanted for herself and not for her death abilities. Orion-been conditioned to want to kill mals. Its his affinity super reinforcedThe School—just wants to protect the students Chinese Enclave kids—don't trust her, don't do their combat runs. othersside characters also felt pretty invested.AtmosphereEmotion of the school and the kids. The feelings the gym creates after its “fixed”WritingGood writing. Very well done being in El's head. Descriptive enough to get a feel with being over the top.PlotEl's class is next up to graduation and the school is off. Mals only seem to be coming for El and her schedule is crazy. The Graduation Obstacle course runs are insane and only get worse. Only with El can you make it through. The School is tired of failing and wants all its students to be protected. The school isn't evil. They come up with a plan to draw all the mals in and kick the school into the void. They do. Patience and Fortitude come back but its just one. Orion pushes El out of the gate.InvestmentVery invested 1st in thinking that the school is trying to kill El. Then that something is going wrong because not enough mana is being released from deaths. Then can they pull it off what will go wrong when they attempt it.LogicThe way that El was thinking things were going to happen and they did or didn't was logical and the plans that everybody made to “fix” the school. Literally everyone comes up with the same idea is so trueEnjoymentLoved this book, missed a little of the romance until 60% throughMiscFixing the gym with the attack against her. Finally able to use those spells of destruction for a good purposeOrion's idea of a date. Getting the familiars Seeing the graduation hall empty. Patience and Temperance Ate everything else then each otherORION pushes her through the Gate and stays behindThe Maleficer getting his spelled turned back on him. Mal's want to obey her? Control over them. Lots didn't attack until she was there. Bean bag at ChloesEverybody thinks it's a trick that she hid until now.Powersharers—Orion can't stop pulling almost literallyA good use of a Honeypot
I will be talking about it on Libromancy https://libromancy.podbean.com/ on 09/25/22

De verdad la magia de estos libros me parece muy divertida, obviamente sobre todo la de El.

Chiquito cliffhanger de final tho.

No me puedes dejar así, Naomi. No me puedes dejar así el libro. Simplemente, no puedes

What the hell????

The Last Graduate (Scholomance 2) by Naomi Novik

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RTH1HUIVXTRQI?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

This is book two in Naomi Novik's Scholomance series.

In the first book, we were introduced to the Scholomance, an isolated educational facility where teenage wizards are confined for four years. Apparently, the world is so populated by evil, manna-consuming, entities, aka “mals”, who love the sweet taste of young wizards that wizard society has to exile its youngsters to a school where they can avoid the 9 out of 10 death rate in the real world. Unfortunately, the Scholomance is also infested with mals, so the death rate in the Scholomance is 3 out of 4.

The real death purge comes at graduation when seniors try to run across graduation hall, which has become thoroughly infested with mals. Consequently, all of the Scholomance activities are directed to learning to be one of the few survivors of the death race across the hall.

In the first book, we were introduced to Galadriel. El was at the low end of the social ladder as a loner “loser.” But El knows something no one knows, she's actually an incredibly gifted “Malificer,” a wizard with the ability to use dark magic. Where other kids are learning spells for cleaning their rules, El is being given spells on destroying armies and cities.

In book one, we see El start to move up the social ladder as she makes a few friends and begins to associate with Orion Lake. Orion is a hero - the unique individual with the ability to kill mals and the generous spirit to do so without being asked.

The second book picks up where the first book ended. At the close of the first book, El and her friends had helped the graduating seniors fix the machinery that cleansed the graduation hall of vermin. In this book, El is now a senior and must deal with her last year at the Scholomance, the question of what her class will discover in the graduation hall, what is to be done about the younger kids, and her own feelings about Orion.

The story makes for a gripping fun read as El intelligently and sarcastically negotiates her last year of the high school from Hell.

There will be a third book, so we may follow El out into the adult world.

what is this ending

This is one of the best audio books that I've ever listened to as the reader was perfect for the 1st person novel. The world building in this series is amazing because it is both detailed and simply described. And while the world of the novel is fantastical, it is highly relatable too. I cannot wait for the next book in this series!??

WTF. That is not how a book is ended.
Liked the story. A lot. Hate the ending. A lot.
WTF

I'm baffled. 1) How can the same author of Spinning Silver, which I found well written, rich and complex, have written this series, which I find the opposite? 2) I truly don't understand how this has a 4.2-star average rating on GoodReads. I tried to make it through after reading that if you liked A Deadly Education you'd like this one. I did like the first book, despite it being very info-dumpy it surprisingly didn't bother me. With this sequel it was all the worst aspects of the first amplified and none of the good. Well maybe the ending is good, like how it was with the first, but it's not worth it to keep going passed 77%.

This series is not good. It's not good in multiple ways, but let's just start from the beginning.

The main characters are about to graduate from the Scholomance and that means they need to find a way to do it without dying to a horde of monsters. Simple, right?

The thing about the Scholomance is that it is fucking awful. The food is shit and poisoned, you can't leave and there aren't even windows or a yard or anything, you have to do basically impossible schoolwork, including just super quick learning about 70000 languages, you can't get any belongings in once you enter, everything from showers to getting stationery from the closet is dangerous.
It's so DUMB. It's so unnecessarily bleak and edgy and “badass”. I just can't stand this whole thing of everything being bad and literally a whole world being invented just to be so emo about it.
And honest, it's not even well thought out. Half the book is spent on El mentally going through things to somehow patch up the gigantic stupid plotholes in this unnecessarily edgetastic nonsensical world. It's bad writing to keep telling and barely showing
Like yeeeeah, totally, it's productive to fucking get the kids murdered for going to grab some fucking pencils. That develops their skills in... what exactly?

Another thing is the super unhealthy relationship between El and Orion.
She keeps shitting on him and acting like a colossal bitch, but then gets territorial and hates others for being dicks to Orion. Or being too nice to him. Or being anything, because the only person who gets Orion is her and her alone and that is why she keeps calling him names.
Just because the magical world is shitty and corrupt doesn't mean her being shitty to him is any less of a bad thing. Such a typical abusive thing.
Before anyone start, NO, I do not care about life being shitty for El. That is no reason to be an ass to Orion. Who is an okay character. But his name is Orion Lake. Literally the stupidest, most fan fiction name EVER.

Things were also repetitive. How many scenes of characters going through an obstacle course do we really need? How many mentions of them going to lunch or to the bathroom together?
How much stream of consciousness BLAH BLAH BLAH?

The last scene had some nice things, that was okay, but this whole idea is just half-baked, kept somewhat afloat by constant expositional inner monologue. Like did the author just realise in book two that the food the kids eat needs to come from somewhere?

Honestly, it's not good. It's focusing on an aesthetic social media fad (dark academia) and the substance is not there.

Fun read.

I feel like I need to start out by saying that the first book in the series, A Deadly Education, left me disappointed. I will admit a lot of that is my own fault for having certain expectations about what a book about the Scholomance should be about, i.e. the famous school of black magic run by the Devil where Dracula himself studied.

That said, this book had the benefit of not having those expectations and being able to stand on its own. While I still didn't love it as much as I'd hoped, the school and world within it exist is very interesting and the ending was strong enough to make sure I come back for book three upon its release.

Thanks to Del Rey Books and NetGalley for allowing me to read a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book, even though I found it a little bit hard to read at some points. The chapters are way too long and the plot felt dragged and so slow sometimes that it was getting boring, but it picked up near the end and it got better.
And, of course, we have that brutal cliffhanger, just like the first book had. This one was even worse though and I'm so curious to see what happens in the next book.

EXCUSE ME. EXCUSE ME. NO, NO ITS NOT GONNA END LIKE THIS. WTF NO. WHY. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GO ON NOW!??!?!?!?