Booklog 54/2022: Naomi Novik: The Last Graduate – Scholomance #2

[jacey]

Everyone raves about the Scholomance books. The first book in the sequence, A Deadly Education, gave us an entirely new concept – a magic school with no teachers (the school itself is magic) which is trying to kill its students unless they can glean enough magic to survive. In order to graduate (a battle through a monster-infested hall) a student has to make good alliances, be really lucky, and/or exceptionally talented. El (Galadriel) is supremely talented but with great potential for dark magic and death. In the first book she was hiding her talents, an outsider with not much chance of graduating, but she gradually acquired friends, and even a love interest in Orion Lake, a young man with a hero complex, and a penchant for killing the monsters that were trying to kill the students. In this book, graduation is approaching and El has a plan to get all the graduating class through without casualties (which is unheard of). Pretty soon that stretches to encompass the whole school. There is a bit of a cliffhanger ending (which I’m not fond of).but the third book, The Golden Enclaves, is due in September 2022 and is already available to pre-order. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, but a fair amount of the second rehashed similar themes, at least for the first half. It started to get more interesting when El’s plan kicked in. Still well worth a read, though. Recommended.