3.25 I really wanted to love this book and there are certainly many ingenious parts and good ideas (loved the mice familiars) in there, but the beginning and the end are a bit suboptimal. In the beginning it does take quite a to pick up steam and though we do learn more about the school and the way it looks and works the pacing was too slow for me. There's a lot more worldbuilding in general, but somehow the world outside still felt kind of hollow to me - even more so than the Scholomance in the first novel.

The first big plot twist was quite satisfying and the plan they embark on is crazy, but not wholly unjustifiable. It does strain the suspense of disbelief, though. But while the first book was about friendship and being annoyed at your friends, this one does have to have a love story and it's predictable and slightly sickening like the final plot twist. Why do all books that focus on a boy and a girl have to go this way? If El had been Elrond and not Galadriel the majority of readers would have been surprised, but this way around it couldn't apparently go any other way. It was one of my greatest disappointments with Naomi Novik so far. Not that I loved the relationship in Uprooted, but at least it wasn't so stylised into romance above all else.

The whole story is still interesting enough to make me want to read the final part, but I do hope there will be more about Liu, Aadhiya, Chloe, Liesel and so on and not more focus on the mostly colourless boys. Though to be fair, there are also a lot of girls that come seemingly out of the woodwork. I guess that's a problem with c0ndensing a busy school year into less than 400 hundred large-print pages.