Adventures In The Scholomance
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The Scholomance series is comprised of three books written by Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves. Although the first two books were published in September/2020 and September/2021 respectively, I did not discover the series until early in 2022. And then I devoured both books in the spring and had to wait until September for the final book to come out. I passed the time by obsessively re-reading both books (you can get the series here). The audio books are also excellent; I bought those too and listened to them multiple times. And then when the third book came out, it turned the first two books on their metaphorical heads. What a ride!
Okay, an explanation. The Scholomance is a magical school…no, not like Hogwarts. Parallels could be drawn, of course, but the feel of these books and this world is utterly different from the Harry Potter series. The Scholomance is where “wise-gifted (magical) children” are sent to attend their four years of high school. Once you are in, you are stuck there until graduation. There is no coming home on summer vacation. In this school, you have to watch out for yourself, because chances are excellent that no one else will watch out for you. You have to beware of the magical instruction (if you don’t do your assignments properly, they can eat you), fellow students (some of whom are “maleficers” and would draw magic forcibly from other living beings) who would prey on you, and all the nasty little critters (known collectively as maleficaria or “mals”) who also want to take your magic, and don’t mind killing and eating you into the bargain.
The reason children are sent away to the grim school where there are no adults to help them and protect them is because life as a teenager outside the Scholomance is worse. The maleficaria come in greater numbers to eat delicious young wizards and chances of death are much higher than inside the Scholomance.
The first two books are set inside the Scholomance. The story is told from the point of view of El Higgins, a loner girl in her junior year who has always had great difficulty in making friends. In fact, she’s never had a friend. With graduation approaching the next year, all the juniors are looking to make alliances with other students for the purposes of surviving the final gauntlet of graduation, where all the seniors must exit past a horde of hungry malifecaria. Many students don’t survive. And the odds of survival are much worse if you can’t count on an alliance of people to help you watch your back as you all fight your way to the exit portal. El, being prickly and sarcastic and somewhat bitter, has made no friends and has no hopes of that changing anytime soon. Through her actions in the story, we see that she has a very firm moral code and a deeply generous spirit, but it’s hard to get past the outer shell to notice that.
At the same time, we are introduced to the other main character, Orion Lake. Unlike El, he is extremely popular, thanks to his chronic habit of saving other students by killing the mals who are trying to eat them. We meet him as he bursts into El’s room to save her from some nasty that has just tried to attack her. Unlike the other students, El is not grateful. She is in fact astonishingly powerful herself and didn’t actually need saving. Orion is so taken aback by her snarled comments that of course he starts following her around and they become friends. Orion also has always had trouble making friends; people tend to look at him as their hero, rather than a person in his own right. And it doesn’t help any that he’s socially awkward. It’s delightful to see him emerge as a real person, both in El’s view and in his own.
We are also introduced to El’s future alliance partners, Aadhya and Liu and Chloe. More important (to El, at least) than the fact that she has an alliance is the fact that she now has friends. It’s lovely to watch her revel in the novel experience of people spending time with her because they want to, not because they are forced to do so by circumstance.
I won’t spoil the plot…suffice to say that I found the first two books exciting. My only gripe is that author Novik sometimes interrupts her action sequences with long explanations about how magic works and/or scenes from El’s past that have relevance in the moment. As these are well-written and interesting, I didn’t mind too much except for the fact that occasionally, by the time the explanation was done, I’d lost track of where we were in the action and had to go back and re-orient myself. But I love these books so much that this is a minor gripe.
The third book takes a sharp right turn and really made me rethink my impressions from the first two books. Not in a bad way but some of the revelations were shocking. I cannot say much about the third book without spoiling the plot for all the books. It takes place outside the Scholomance, and we meet a number of new characters (family members of our students, mostly), we get a good view inside the enclaves (essentially magical wizard fortresses that only the elite can live in), and we come to understand the dark underpinnings of much of wizard society. Two minor gripes: What happened to Chloe (who became part of El’s alliance in the second book)? She shows up briefly and then is never mentioned again, as if she’d ceased to exist. A friend of mine said, “I wonder if she was just edited out.” Maybe. Also, there is an extended surreal sequence where El and a friend are escaping from the London enclave. As far as I can tell, this psychedelic narrative, which stretches over 23 pages (it felt like more), is completely non-essential to the story. If there was something I was supposed to learn or remember for the later part of the book, I didn’t get it. This is not normally a failing of Novik; she is not in the habit of putting non-essential exposition into her books. So either this was a rare mistake on her part or, more likely, I missed something. Either way, I really could have done without that bad acid trip.
It’s difficult for me to properly express how much I love these books. When the third book was released, it arrived on the Kindle app on my iPad at 9 PM. I had finished all 400+ pages by 1 AM. I absolutely could not put it down. Now I’m taking the time to slowly and carefully re-read all three books in order, as the first two books will be a different experience now in light of the revelations of the third. You can order the entire trilogy here. Trust me…buy all three together. You’ll regret it if you can’t read them all one right after another.
Naomi Novik, I salute you.
