The Golden Enclaves

The ending felt very rushed and like a fourth book would have been needed to resolve the story.
The rest of the story was quite good and managed the step from the Scholomance to the outside world very nicely.

a great ending to the great Scholomance trilogy. had some twists i didn't see coming while still bringing everything to a satisfying close.

like the other books in this series, it manages to feel kinda cozy while super dark 😅

i think it's the lovable cast of characters, particularly the primary protagonist who i find quite relatable as an outcast determined not to be the evil the world wants her to be.

also the darkness is offset by the fact that there is hope throughout, even when things get pretty bleak (though often that hope is more stubbornness than anything 😅)

strongly recommended to anyone who loved the first two entries in the series.

You would be forgiven for looking at a pithy summary of the Scholomance series and thinking this is yet another magical school wish fulfillment story. There’s a magical school, an extra-magical misfit main character who unexpectedly makes friends, a prophecy, monsters and sinister forces. Yet, for all that, this is a tale with a spirit firmly planted in reality that bends all the tropes.

What do you do when you are the best at defeating monsters when the real monster is deep systemic injustice?

Naomi Novik is producing some of the most interesting and creative fantasy stories of this generation. They are well worth your time.

Not my favorite of the 3, but still a page turner. And anecdotally, it seems like really good source material to understand Gen Z point of view. Maybe it's just the recent midterm elections that make me see it through that lens but

Recent graduates (just the right age)
Magic (mana) as wealth that is zero-sum
Privileged enclaves of elites
A structural system designed to benefit the powerful at the expense of the weak

And so on. The characters interact with each other in that framework throughout, and it works.

A really strong trilogy. Could not put it down once I started. The last volume had lots of surprises — magic as an eco thriller, if you will.

I think my biggest complaint about these three novels would be that the author does a lot more telling rather than showing, which I tend to dislike. There's no shortage of that in the beginning of this novel, but ultimately this might be my favorite book of the series. It finishes really strongly and I found myself more emotionally invested than I thought I would be. I can't say too much more without giving away some important plot elements, but defs recommend if you've read the first two books.

The first half was not that interesting to me, and although I care for the main character and the magic, the long chapters and the meandering thoughts made focusing hard haha