Golden Enclaves

Realize that I was there. I was completely invested from the first two books. Yet somehow, I still can't figure how, I was alienated from El, the main character, right in the beginning of this book. I couldn't understand her choices and I didn't get what she was feeling. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to connect with her as the story proceeded.

That said, I finished it because the plot was wonderful. It brought together very complex magic and lore to a cohesive end. Yet, I felt like I'd already lost a friend. Very frustrating.

This final book of the Scholomance trilogy starts as our heroine, the wizard El (now about 18), is plunged back into an isolated present-day Welsh commune. There she has to deal with her grief at being forced to see her boyfriend Orion left to an eternity of being eaten by a beast known as a maw mouth and uncertainty that she will after all fulfil the prophecy that she will turn in an evil ‘malcifer’ witch. It’s not long before El is called, somewhat bitterly and begrudgingly, to use her exceptional abilities to help rescue enclaves, the residences of extremely privileged wizards. During these escapades, El teams up with the academically minded Leisel, now also an ‘enclaver’, and together with one of El’s friends from the previous books they work to discover Orion’s fate. [Aside: there’s a physical relationship between El and Leisel here - I didn’t find this at all a problem, the explanations feel realistic for the characters experience.] I was a bit frustrated at the end of book 2 that, because the location of the books were cut off from the outside world, we really couldn’t progress at working out what the menace targeting the enclaves was. Well rest assured, there’s a twist as we learn the enclavers’ malevolent secrets and watch our characters struggle against those determined to hang onto power at whatever cost. In fact, an underlying theme here is just not the advantages of privilege, but the lesson of just how evils in society can be perpetuated by justifying actions as a lesser evil. There’s also some really interesting descriptions of the joys and burdens of family and friendships, especially across cultures. The book has sections set everywhere from London, Mumbai and New York, to Dubai and Beijing, meaning there’s a lot of international travel between the action. These sections suffer from some uneven pacing (a flight to New York is described in intricate detail, which jars against a section of travel from Portugal to Wales that just passes in an ‘El was distracted and didn’t remember it’). [Aside: as a young adult book, I’d have liked to think our characters would have been a bit more concerned about just roaming around the world via long-haul flights too.] The other main negative is that you can definitely pull holes in the magic - not everything said about how it works is consistent with the final resolutions (it’s nearly there but not quite). That said, the twists, the struggles and the outcome provide a satisfying conclusion to this coming-of-age story. I’m mostly going to remember the character of El, she remained somewhat annoyingly angsty to the end, but she sure knew how to pull off a big fight, whether that was against evil monsters or the more-complicated enemy - people.