A Deadly Education

Naomi Novak invokes both Le Guin and Rowling as providing the seeds of this book. As it is, the author writes far better than Rowling and cracks a lot more jokes than LeGuin. She also has LeGuin's intelligence.

A Deadly Education is the first in a trilogy. It is, as with many so-called YA novels, a Bildungsroman. In the fantasy genre, this often involves the youthful protagonist discovering that they have hidden magical talents. In the case of Novik's Galadriel, the heroine already knows full well that she is an extremely powerful wizard, but she has to deal with a Dead Father and an Awful Curse.

Galadriel has enrolled in a school for magicians, despite her mother's obvious misgivings. The world is a dangerous place for young wizards, who are the preferred tasty snacks of a horde of magical nasties. Nowhere is safe, but Galadriel believes that the school provides some measure of protection. This is moot: the book opens with her being saved in extremis from one of the fell creatures by the school's white knight, Orion (the Hunter) Lake.

The school itself is a satire on meritocracy. Open to anyone who has magical talents, it has in fact been designed to ensure that the children of the patrician class are protected, while the oiks draw off the hungry monsters. Galadriel is, so far as the rich kids are concerned, an oik. Even worse, at the opening of the book she is utterly friendless. "You feel," one of the other characters tells her, "like it's gonna rain."Orion almost immediately assumes that she is a murderess, and spends a whole chapter looking forward to putting her down. Once he discovers who the true murderer is, he spends the rest of the book trying to make up for his initial poor judgement. Galadriel, for her part, is as rude to him and to his friends as she can be. (One of the book's jokes is the array of insults she throws at him). This is a dangerous game, as Orion's friends are among the most powerful of her fellow students.

Despite the feeling of doom that she inspires in others, Galadriel gradually comes to discover friendship, and by the end of the book she has built up a small but well-knit group with whom to face the terrors that the school will throw at her in the following volumes.

The curse under which the heroine lives, and which has resulted in her rejection by her father's family (they attempted to put her down like a pariah dog), is a prophecy, announced by her great grandmother, that she would destroy the enclaves. The enclaves are the sheltered spaces in which the patrician wizards seal themselves off from the rest of the world for their own safety and comfort. Galadriel's Mum is having none of this; a nurturant Earth Mother, she lives in a commune in Wales, dispensing her healing magic for free, taking in strays, and giving her powerful spells away to anyone who wants them. Despite her daughter's pleading, she refuses to seek safety in one of the enclaves, and one suspects she looks on her daughter's promised future as a blessing rather than a curse.

The fact that there are no teachers in the school is a great relief. One the reader's burdens in the school novel is having to shudder through the usual stock of masters and mistresses being authored into significance. The children in Novik's novel are faced with a magical algorithm which is both cunning and deranged. It seems designed to trap the students into wasting their energies on pointless exercises, punishing them for any deviation from the plan by exposing them to one or another of the hungry monsters. The very Ideal Type of the School, in fact.

By all means, read this book.

4.5 Snarky Hopepunk masquerading as Grimdark. Novik paints her most realistic characters in a horribly twisted world that isn't so different from ours on a deeper level. The pacing is great and never seems too hurried or too slow. The school is fascinating if ghastly and the spell-casting is quite original.

There are few real complaints to make. I could have done with a little more in the way of physical description. Even though it's mentioned a couple of times that everybody wears ratty mundane clothing it doesn't really feel like that until later in the book. There is also relatively little architectural detail, unless it becomes really important. The final twist, while certainly effective, is a little clichéd. And of course, the two main characters are both loners with huge heapings of magical ability, but yeah, what did you except when the school is literally trying to get you killed?

Can't wait for the next volume. Fingers crossed that it's not going to turn into a hetero romance. Friendship for the win!

A UK based school of magic, but with a much darker twist than Hogwarts. In this version of our world, children who develop magic as they enter their teens become targets for the dark monsters that need to feed on magic, and magical children are a tasty magic-filled snack that hasn't yet learned to defend itself. Adult magic-users band together into powerful Enclaves to keep each other safe. And any children identified as developing magic are placed into the Scholomance, a magical school slightly outside of the real world where they either learn self-defense skills or die trying. Only 1 in 4 students survive to graduation (but their chances would be only 1 in 20 if not taken into the Scholomance) so they are all EXTREMELY focused on survival.

The book is told from the point of view of El, aka Galadriel, daughter of a hippie mother specializing in healing magic and crystals, who rejected the enclaves and raised her in a yurt in a Welsh commune. El, in contrast, has an affinity for spells of mass destruction and has to spend much of her concentration trying to NOT accidentally invent spells for mass plagues and genocides. The book follows through her second-to-last year at the Scholomance, as she's trying to navigate politics, lack of friends, and unexpected threats to the school's entire existence.

Although the story wraps up satisfactorily there's clearly the intent of a sequel to come for El's final year.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and it wasn't until coming to Goodreads to write a review that I learned there's apparently been a bit of a twitter tempest about some racist stereotypes used in the book. The author clearly did make a deliberate effort to make the school extremely multicultural, and El herself is biracial. Apparently, she made some errors in the attempt. Apparently she has apologized and future editions will be released with some edits: www.naominovik.com/apology/ Reading the reviews written by BIPOC they seem divided; some find some passages offensive, others are forgiving of unintended microagressions created through the intention of being inclusive. Not being an expert I won't try to issue a judgement, just calling out that it's something to be aware of and decide for yourself if you decide to pick this book up. I certainly enjoyed the book a lot outside those issues and would have given it 5 stars otherwise; hopefully Novik will use some sensitivity readers for the sequel and avoid any future issues!