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

Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education (Hardcover, 2020, Del Rey) 4 stars

A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure …

Fun all the way through

4 stars

A lot of reviewers complained reasonably that the worldbuilding is pretty unbelievable at times, but I was having too much fun to notice.

I loved the big gimmick underlying the whole book: the protagonist has the talents and affinities to be the most powerful and destructive necromancer of her generation - there’s even prophecies about her! - but she was raised by pacifist hippies and works incredibly hard not to accidentally incinerate or mind-control her classmates, building power not by sacrificing animals but through push-ups and crochet.