A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars To embrace or reject your inner malificer What’d you do if you were a disliked almost ostracized student in a magical school for future wizards and couldn’t access malia, the shortcut to mana power, because malia is sucked up from living creatures, which will turn you into a malificer (dark magician) and because your magical “affinity” is “laying waste to multitudes,” and you are doing your best not to become the uber-dark queen (“I can blaze a trail to Mordor anytime I want”) enchantress destroyer of worlds? You’d do a lot of situps, pushups, and jumping jacks, with some frustrating crocheting on the side, because physical and mental stress accumulate mana more safely (if more slowly). Thus, 17-year-old junior Galadriel Higgins (call her El but never Gal) is in great shape. Which is another problem, because the stronger she becomes by exercising, the more exercising she has to do to gather mana from her effort! The “Deadly Education” of the title of Naomi Novik’s first Scholomance book (2020) turns out not to refer to what the students of the magical school *learn* but to what traditionally happens to at least half of the students in any given year, with especially high mortality rates for seniors at graduation, the most dangerous part of their educations. The Scholomance is built into a magical void, with only the gate the students walk through at graduation connected to the real world, which is why graduation is so dangerous--the most powerful malefecars (magical demons called mals for short) infesting the school have eaten the weaker ones as they wait at the gate for the graduates to walk through. Novik asks us to believe that magical children from age 13 to 18 would be in greater danger of being eaten by mals out in the world going to schools for “mundanes” (i.e., muggles) than they are when gathered together in the Scholomance, which, unlike Hogwarts, doesn’t have a single teacher or adult wizard in charge on site. We have to accept that those in charge would toss thousands of kids into the school without any adult supervision and without any (recent) attempt to clean out the myriad mals lurking in every nook and cranny, so that to try to reduce the risk of mals eating them the students have to maintain spells of protection on their dorm room doors and go in groups to meals and snack-runs and classes and study sessions and showers (one reason why they smell rather ripe). It develops that enrollment has been increased by including kids whose parents don’t belong to elite, powerful, and wealthy magical “enclaves,” so the riffraff may serve as soft-target gazelles to increase the chances that the enclave kids will survive. But still… Anyway. Novik entertainingly imagines how such a school might function and how students would choose majors (artifice, alchemy, or incantations), attend classes, study, submit homework, get library books, eat meals, trade (spells, artifacts, homework, clothes, etc.), form cliques and alliances, and so on. She also imagines a large number of different mals, including soul-eaters, mimics, sirenspiders, and groglers, each with different methods for catching and eating young wizards in training. Unlike in Harry Potter, magic here is not a free and unlimited resource but is based on power that the magic users have to get from somewhere. El must exercise to generate the minimum magical energy she needs to get by, because she refuses to go the malia route and comes from a mundane commune instead of from a magical enclave, whose kids can access mana pools. Novik checks off (too?) many of the boxes for popular young adult fiction: first-person narrator (blessedly not present tense), protagonist who is a uniquely powerful outsider forced to hide her power, fraught romance, dangerous competitions, sarcastic banter, food details, absence of parental supervision and support, etc. From the catchy first line (“I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life”), the plot, which takes place during about two or three weeks near the end of the school year, is page-turning, as it reveals the details of the magical school and world (El is an expert guide to the Scholomance, saying things like, “Breakfast isn't half as dangerous as dinner, but it's still never good to walk alone”) and develops El’s character (from an excess of “negativity of spirit” to something a little more trusting). Although Novik’s magical world is hetero so far, she does write a wider range of races and cultures and languages than Rowling does in Harry Potter, including El, who is half-Welsh and half-Mumbai Indian and has a Chinese friend, an African friend, and a white friend, Orion Lake, the silver-haired do-gooding combat magic affinity boy from the New York enclave who goes around the school saving other students’ lives, including El’s, much to her chagrin. At her best, Novik writes fine fantasy passages, like this vivid, witty one: “What came flying out of the void in answer was a horrible tome encased in some kind of pale crackly leather with spiked corners that scraped unpleasantly as it skidded to me across the middle of the desk. The leather had probably come off a pig, but someone had clearly wanted you to think it had been flayed from a person, which was almost as bad, and it flipped itself open to a page with instructions for enslaving an entire mob of people to do your bidding.” She writes spicy dialogue, like: “Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.” “I'm not most people… Also the seating arrangements *are* an act of war.” But there are also some places that try too hard to be YA snarky, like: “In your dreams, rich boy. I'm not one of your groupies.” “Yeah, I didn't notice.” And Novik via El inaccurately disses a great book: “However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another.” This is a misreading and a misapplication of William Golding’s novel. The reader of the audiobook, Anisha Dadia, inserts pauses even when the text has no punctuation, especially after the first key word of a sentence, which got on my nerves. “Her scream [pause] had already been cut off into a dying gurgle.” Otherwise, she’s a good reader. (Well, El and Orion don’t sound so Welsh and New York.) People who like Harry Potter type fantasy but for/about older kids, like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, should like this book. (There is a frank talk about birth control.) Will I go on to read the second and third entries in the trilogy? Probably, but not as audiobooks! View all my reviews
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