A Deadly Education

, #1

304 pages

English language

Published Feb. 26, 2020 by TBS/GBS/Transworld.

ISBN:
978-1-5291-0085-3
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(168 reviews)

“With flawless mastery, Naomi Novik creates a school bursting with magic like you’ve never seen before, and a heroine for the ages—a character so sharply realized and so richly nuanced that she will live on in hearts and minds for generations to come.”

5 editions

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

A wizard school, but everything is fresh

I've read all three books and I loved it!

Without giving any spoilers, it's a very cool inversion of all the Harry Potter tropes. We start in a dark setting. Kids dying in troves. Everyone fends for themselves. Everyone shuns our protagonist and she hates everyone. Even magic itself seems to taunt her. But this is her normal, and everyone treats it as just another day at school.

So all the things that happen just move us to a better place. We are "told" about the bad stuff and we are "shown" the good stuff. Altogether it's a lovely happy story that's a joy to read.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

It is that good.

Content warning Spoiler

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Review of 'A Deadly Education' on 'LibraryThing'

A solid series.returnreturnThe Scholomance series is kind of like a dark version of Harry Potter, from the perspective of Tom Riddle - if Tom Riddle had known he was going to turn into Voldemort and was trying his damndest to not turn evil.returnreturnIt is written in 1st-person, and there can be a tendency toward navel-gazing, so you might find yourself thinking, "what's going on outside her head?" but if you can get through that, it's a pretty enjoyable series.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

A tasty introduction

Cons: It's not really a standalone. You'll want to know more and the cliffhanger at the end is primo.

Pros: Everything else. Characters are great and evolve, world seems consistent, the reasons magic doesn't solve everything feel right, the

El (Short for Galadriel, like, you know, "All shall love me and despair!”) is an outcast and a hard worker. Her mom is a kind hippy wizard who sees her differently than the rest of the world, which is to say her mom loves her and doesn't think she is a force of darkness destined to be an evil supervillain. She works hard to do things ONLY in the good ways so she never sets a foot on the path of darkness, no matter how many people she desires to invert over an ant-pile in the course of a day.

We meet El inside the Scholomance, a superdark high school for …

Excellent Trilogy Starter

No rating

I put a lot of weight on the main character, and El is relatable in a prickly, keep-your-distance kind of way. Thoroughly enjoyable to read.

The magic system was unique and very well thought out. The social commentary was obvious, but enjoyable. I'm interested to see if they expand the worldbuilding beyond the school in the later books.

I desperately want a My Immortal version of this, and it's also sort of like this is a somehow good version of My Immortal.

Drawbacks: El does tend to infodump. It's also painfully obvious that this is the first part of a trilogy rather than a complete story. Not sure I've ever read a book where that was so obvious.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

entertaining and unique

Loved the premise here, even if at times I questioned some of the internal logic of the magic laws at work. I was a little put off at the start by the narrative tone, but I eventually found a rhythm and it stopped bothering me. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Review of 'A Deadly Education' on 'Goodreads'

Another spin on the magical school, except the inhabitants of this one are actively trying to kill the students. Great opening volume to a series that I'll definitely read more of, and that I'll be recommending to like-minded readers of YA fantasy.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

A Deadly Education

Aw, this was a lot of fun. I enjoy the author’s other work and I’m glad that I enjoy this one too - and have a series to look forward to! On my library audiobook app it’s titled ‘A Deadly Education: TikTok made me read it’ which is very funny to me, I didn’t know it got big on tiktok. It makes sense though, it’s good YA that has (imo) well-executed themes of privilege & how it can be ignored by those who benefit from it, it’s got an undeniably dark academia-compatible setting, and it’s got… like…. a ratfic (as in fiction coming out of the rationalist community, like uhhh HPMOR) vibe, if ratfic identified itself more often as a viewpoint particularly attractive to teenagers as a kind of bad way of dealing with a specific set of probably temporary dissatisfactions than the ratfic I’ve read has. (That is pretty …

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Good in every single way

I love this book and this series. I’m reading A Deadly Education for the second time, and it’s just as fun as the first time I read it. One thing I love about Novik’s style in this book is how she interleaves the background context so thoroughly into the unrelenting pace of the narrative. There’s so much more to love about this book - just read it!

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Perfectly dark. Perfectly humorous.

I love fantasy novels and Harry Potter holds a special place in my heart, so finding a new British school book that's darker, gripping, and has a very different style of magic was extremely exciting. Try this book and you won't be disappointed. I will admit that I was annoyed by the MC in the beginning, but that fell away as I was introduced to the world and her own character developed.

reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Slow burn

This book was such a slow burn for me. Coming highly praised, I came in here expecting a traditional school of wizardry tale. But your HP it is not. It's good though, very good.

Told from first person perspective, our narrator is Galadriel, a sophomore at the Scholomance, a deadly place of education indeed. The students learn magic simply by surviving the many horrors the school throws at them. There are no houses or anything the like, but alliances to make sure you survive your senior year. Students have to fight their way out, through masses of monsters.

Galadriel is a loner though. Secretly, she's one of the most powerful magic-users of the school, but she can only use spells of destruction. As the story progresses, Galadriel has to make alliances herself, and figure out if she and the most prolific monster killer of Scholomance, Orion Lake, are dating or …

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