+ Intriguing premise with original world-building
- The setting raises some questions which will hopefully be answered in the next book
+ Diverse characters
- If I have to nitpick, diversity feels slapped in for selling point
+ Independent, strong, savage MC with a sarcastic remark ready at all times. It was a joy to read her dialogues.
- El is a loner and basically mean to everyone when it's common sense to make friends who will look out for you in such a setting. Interesting character but desperately needed some development by the end of the book.
+ Well written side characters. Considering that most of this book was to explain the world-building and El's thoughts, it is understandable that we get to see very little about the other characters and yet the author managed to make them memorable.
- Most of the time is spent in the world-building, so nothing much happens. Then the book ends in a mini-cliffhanger. This could have been a single big book or a duology instead of a trilogy.

Writing style:
This was a quick and unputdownable read for me because I've developed a liking for info-dumping stories these days. To give you an example, let's say our characters encounter a monster. In the middle of an action scene, there would be a couple of pages about the monster and some history about it before we get back to the action. I found this good because I was quite intrigued about the world, but others may not like this style.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and am waiting to read the next books to see character development and get some answers.

The narrative definitely skewed my opinion on this and was tricky for me to take seriously for the book's first half. The whole story felt like one giant cauldron of drama with fascinating world-building. It was drama that grew on me though and by the end, I was ready to dive right into the second book.

The magic here is fascinatingly cruel, and the hints at the politics of the world outside the Scholomance being reflected somewhat within (tempered by the whole 'plenty of children die' thing) is fascinating. The environment is what shines for me in this book, and the ending leaves me on hooks waiting to see what consequences await in book 2.

The good thing about reading a first book in a completed series/trilogy is that if you enjoy the book, the rest are waiting for you to binge and you are not left in a cliff-hanger waiting for a future publication date; the bad thing about enjoying the first book in a completed trilogy is that you now need to binge the remaining books and your well-organized to-be-read list just got a hole blown in it. So yeah, I have a couple books that I will be binging very soon.
So why did I enjoy it? It isn't just a random dark academia novel since the genre is popular but actually a solid, easy to read novel set in the world of its main character who just so happens to be a student at Scholomance. This book is told in first-person, and for me, the key to first-person is to truly absorb the voice of that character and the author really delivers as a sarcastic teen trying to figure out romantic relationships, friendships, family, magic, and her place in the world. The description of her school, and the cliques within it as well as the adventures got me so hooked into the story that I didn't want to put it down till the end and at the end was yearning to find out what senior year would be like for Galadriel and how long will it take her to act on her feelings for Orion. And any time the first book of a series leaves me this eager for the next book, I say it is a success.
I received advanced digital access to this book thru NetGalley (for which I want to thank NetGalley and the publisher, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Rey) for an honest review. The opinion expressed here is my own.

El is actually a superior magician, but no one else at the Scholomance knows it; she’s been hiding her talent, hoping to be asked to join an alliance. Why might she need an alliance? Well, the Scholomance is a school kind of like a semi-sentient Hogwarts with no teachers, really brutal cliques, and an out-of-control infestation of all sorts of magical monsters (called maleficers or “mals”), large and small, that want nothing more than to eat the students. The only way out of the school is to graduate and walk through the only exit, which is a hall where the largest infestation of mals exists, a whole menagerie of monsters lying in wait to eat whoever dares to enter.

Do not go into this book expecting it to be ANYTHING like Novik’s other works. It’s not a rich fairytale, instead it’s brutal, dark, and relentlessly creepy. It’s about survival. The world-building is just so cool. I mean, the setting itself is fascinating. A self-regulating living organism of the school with the self-regulated life and education, WHAT? The writing style is very stream-of-consciousness writing, which I personally enjoyed. I rooted for the FMC, El, entirely. Her grumpiness was endearingly amusing to me, and the more she was unfairly disliked or distrusted, the more protective of her I got and I wished nothing but the best for her.

There’s really nothing more I would expect from a book about a magical school with guarantees of death if you don't graduate.

Thank you Netgalley and Random Group for sending me a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

We follow El in this story. She joins the Scholomance, which is a deadly school for mages. Many students don't survive the creatures that infest the halls and the ones that do survive are part of wealthy guilds and stick together. A lone person like El is a red flag to every monster that crowls in the halls. But, it should be no surprise that a girl, who's been prophesized to destroy the mages, might have a few tricks up her sleeve. But, it won't be easy to survive alone.

The concept of this book was great, but the writing style was not for me. The story started with an infodump, and the plot began to get more interesting around 50% of the story. I really enjoyed the dynamic between El and Orion and I might read the next book just to see how their relationship will develop.

This was such an enjoyable read!

There enough action throughout the story to keep me interested through some of the more mundane narrative. I did find the writing a bit difficult to understand from time to time, as though the writer seemed to sometimes try to make the sentences more complex than they needed to be in order to sound interesting. It also took me a minute to grasp the jargon of this particular environment, but doing so helped me to enjoy the setting even more. It's dark and whimsy at the same time, and it balances magic and reality so evenly that it felt like a real school with real people that you could pass on the street in your everyday life.

The author does an incredible job providing commentary on social class and social stratification, and I love the way that power and magic are fused together in this story.

I also found the main character (El) incredibly and (ironically, if you've read it) effortlessly likeable. I’m excited to see how her relationships with the diverse cast of the story continue to develop in the consequent books. Plus, that ending?! I'm reading the next book in the series asap!

This book is perfection to me. Everything about is great. The writing, the characters, the magic, the world??? All great. Six stars if I could.

Our main character, El, is a badass and I loved her growth throughout the series. El has to be one of my favorite main characters ever written and she's so different than any other mc I've read. Orion, the best himbo ever created, was such a great character also. All the side characters added so much depth to the story. Every character felt so real and I totally bought into this whole world.

The story and pacing were great, I loved how we were finding out more and more about the Scholomance, lore surrounding it, and about the different enclaves and magical hierarchy. This book had some serious moments, where I definitely shed a few tears but also? this book was FUNNY. The way the dialogue is written between characters actually had me laughing.

This book was unlike anything I've ever read, and I can't wait to read more by Naomi Novik.

Thanks to Netgalley and Ballantine for this ARC!

How much I love a prickly heroine who is trying <i>so. hard.</i> to be good and the universe is just throwing her all these lowballs to turn into the doom mistress they want her to be... meanwhile making simple tasks like cleaning her room or filtering drinking water <b>herculean</b> in effort. And how adorable it is that she's so rude to this total himbo who's constantly saving people, but because she's actually honest (even if her honesty is abrasive) he's stuck forlornly following her around like a lost puppy because she sees him in a way no one else does.

And yeah, the writing is subpar. The exposition dumps are done terribly and there's often poor connectors between them. BUT I also love all the world-building details so I likewise love and eat them up? It's a conundrum, for sure.

The biggest things that sold me on this series were:
- the sentient school (petty, stingy, suspiciously generous, etc)
- the eat-the-rich vibes
- the library scene (and particularly the <i>book</i>)
- autistic coded male main character
- the dynamic between El and Orion

Did I totally rant the first time I read it about how poorly written it was and I hated it? Yes.
Did I realize part way through the rant that I thought I hated it but in retrospect I think I actually loved it though? Also Yes!

This book is not for everyone. And hoo boy she's messy. But also I love it endlessly and will shout it from the rooftops forever. :3

The world building happens at lightning speed as does character development. I’ve read Novik’s Temeraire series but I guess Scholomance is written for a younger audience and therefore the pace.

It’s an entertaining, plot-driven story and on the surface about how magic works and the age old fight between good vs evil. But I liked that Novik described building up the potential for good magic - mana - through music, exercise, doing chores, and bad magic - malia - by stealing from others. It’s not subtle but the message is sound.

The writing is crisp and tight. Not one word wasted, even though the sentences are longer than average. It’s also funny. A couple of things I didn’t love: the prolonged instances of the protagonist Galadriel talking about herself. Too often and for too long. It deepened her character but did largely nothing for the plot. Second, because the entire story is so action packed, the climax was a non event. It felt like we were building towards something major, but I was disappointed with the end.

Still, overall an entertaining and easy read. I’d recommend it if you like fantasy and are looking for something very light to fill the gap between two more serious books.

Listen- I don't care if people think it's overdone. A magic school? That's the damn dream. And it's gonna grab me. Every. Single. Time. Plus it doesn't hurt that we have a snarky sarcastic FMC and hero who's a bit of a goof- which is always a match made in drama and swoon heaven. This is a dark comedy with all the delicious twists and addictive storytelling. Excited for what will come next.

I'm surprised that I got approved to read this. I don't even remember requesting it unless I did it years ago I just now got approved. The book has been out so long that I already own all of them. I really enjoyed the series but then I have enjoyed all the Naomi Novik books I have read so far.

Naomi Novik has quickly become a must-read author for me. After this book, she’s pretty much a must-buy author (I only have maybe 5 of those, so that says something, I think!). But, still, when requesting this book, what I’d read from her had been both of her fairytale retellings and the first several of her Napoleonic wars/dragon historical fantasy series. This didn’t sound remotely like either of those, instead being billed as a modern, more grim, “Harry Potter” style boarding school story. But man, Novik can do anything, and my trust is now fully earned, no matter how strange the book description is!

Scholomance is technically a school. There are no teachers and students are on their own to make classes and finish homework, sure. But that’s only half, and arguably the less important half, of what this school provides. Instead, it offers magical kids the best chance they have of surviving their juvenile years. Sure, their odds are still pretty darn bad in the school, but better than the next to nothing they have outside. El’s chances have been even worse from the start. Yeah, she has the raw power, but she seems to repel people for some reason. And in a place where forming alliances is a necessary survival tactic, that’s not good. But here, in her second to last year at the school, staring down the barrel of a final year full of even more likely death, El begins to uncover secrets about not only the school, but herself, and the boy who has been roaming around annoyingly playing savior to all this entire time.

I adored everything about this book, so it’s kind of hard to think of where to start when reviewing it. It’s also so totally unique, interesting, and complicated that it’s hard to find the middle ground between reviewing important aspects of the story and not spoiling the fun for new readers. There’s just so much good stuff to unpack!

I guess I’ll start with the world-building itself. The book description has a tough job trying to describe what Scholomance really is, and, as you can see, I probably struggled too in my own summary. That’s because it’s so complicated and well-constructed that it’s almost impossible to really give a broad overview. Novik seems to have thought out every intricate detail for this magical place, from how the cafeteria works, to the menacing library, to the simplest of things, like how the school assigns and monitors homework and what happens if students fall behind. And it’s all just so creative! I can’t think of a single other fantasy story that has anything like the place Novik has thought up here. And that’s saying something, I think, in a genre that is becoming more crowded by the day (especially YA that has a tendency to become trope-ridden and bogged down in certain themes every few years).

One of the most impressive aspects of all of this that, being as complicated and detailed as it all is, our narrator is given a heavy load of information to be handing off to readers. There’s a significant portion of the first half of the book that is largely devoted to detailing all of these little aspects. It would have been so easy for it to have felt like info-dumping or to have dragged down the pacing and plot of the story. But, for one thing, the information being provided is just too interesting on its own to feel bored by. And secondly, our narrator had a fantastic voice from the start that is strong enough to carry this type of detail-ridden load.

El is everything I like in a narrator: snarky, consistently characterized, yet vulnerable in ways that we (and she) discover throughout the story. From the book description, I was kind of expecting some type of tired anti-hero story or quasi-villain plot line for her, but it’s really nothing like that. Sure, her powers are destructive and there’s this pesky doomsday-esque prophesy lingering around her, but she’s just as skeptical of all that nonsense as the reader wants to be. El’s story, here, is not only finding acceptance with some key friends around her, but in accepting what she has to offer. On one hand, she can be overly confident, but on the other, we see her realize her own values and where her personal lines are between survival and standing up for some moral greater good.

And to balance her out, of course, we have a “Chosen One.” This friendship was everything! Both El and Orion’s characters play perfectly off each other. She, stand-offish, uninterested, and, again, snarky. He, bumbling, clueless of his affect on people, and obnoxiously heroic. I loved everything about this friendship and the slow build to sort of romance that it comes to towards the end.

It’s also clear, here, where the comparisons to “Harry Potter” are coming from. Orion Lake is definitely a response to Harry Potter and all of the other “chosen” heroes we see in fantasy fiction. Novik has said that “Spinning Silver” was essentially her “yelling” at the “Rumpelstiltskin” fairytale, and that this would be her yelling at “Harry Potter.” Comparisons to “Harry Potter always make me nervous. For one thing, I love Harry Potter so, for me, a book being compared to it is either going to be a massive let-down of trying to copy something that shouldn’t be copied. Or it’s going to be some type of “response” piece that spends more time criticizing another book series than in being its own thing. Luckily, this falls right in the middle and does it perfectly.

You can definitely see where Novik is making a point about the type of “chosen one” story that Harry Potter tells, but, while she does touch on some of the obvious themes, she also deep dives into a lot of aspects of this type of storyline that one doesn’t often think about. There’s a strong focus on inequality and injustice, but it’s approached through angles and perspectives that are unique to this world. The themes, of course, carry over, but it stays true to the fantasy world it is and the types of justice and injustice that would be inherent to it. It’s left to the reader to transcribe these thoughts onto our own world and our own experiences of injustice within society.

This review has already gotten pretty long, and I could go on and on. But, in this case, I almost feel like the less said the better! There’s so much great stuff to discover here that I don’t want to spoil any more of it! Needless to be said, my copy is already pre-ordered, and I highly recommend any and all fantasy fans to get their hands on this book ASAP!

Rating 10:Breaking fantasy walls that I didn’t know even exited! Simply fantastic!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is a gripping ride through a world of magic and danger. With a tough and relatable protagonist, El, facing deadly monsters in a unique magical school, the story keeps you hooked from start to finish. The inventive magic system and Novik's immersive writing style create an enthralling atmosphere, even if pacing occasionally falters. If you're up for a spellbinding adventure, dive into this captivating read!

As much as I liked the concept and the plot, the writing really ruined it all for me.

It was so much info text and just rows and rows of text and not enough space between everything. The chapters was long and just packed with information that made little to no sense at al.

This could be so much better than it was.

But I keep reading cuz I didn't want to Dnf it. And I have to say I'm glad I didn't. Cuz the last chapters was great and of course it enden with a cliffhanger.

But for the love of God why can't there be more space between al the scenteses in this book? It's like reading a dictionary.

I just hope book 2 is not in the same format.

This was such a great start to a fantasy series. I loved the dark academia vibes of The Scholomance. I also loved all the characters and how El's friendships with each of them developed over the course of the book.

Ok, there is a lot of good about this book, and a lot of not so good.
As a reading experience, I felt swept into another world, as I always do with Novik's writing. The characters were flawed, and I enjoyed my time with them. I am intrigued enough by the world that I might pick up the following books if I am so inclined.
There are some stereotypes that didn't sit as well with me, and that lowered my rating a bit.
So, all in all, I did enjoy my read. If you are looking for something to replace HP in your life, this may be a good fit for you.

"We're not meant to all survive, anyway. The school has to be fed somehow."

I know that this got a VERY mixed reaction but I loved it and I need The Last Graduate in my life.

*I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first Naomi Novik book and I very much enjoyed it. I had no expectations and I enjoyed it enough that I immediately picked up the second one. I really enjoyed the world building and specifically the monsters.

I hear a lot of “it’s Harry Potter, but deadly/higher stakes”. However I would say that this isn’t Harry Potter at all other than it’s a boarding school. I think I would better explain it as fans that previously enjoyed Harry Potter would likely enjoy this book. The deadly school world building is closer to a “much less spicy” Fourth Wing and character vibes closer to the Crush series.

Please be forewarned, I really enjoyed book one and two but I was ultimately let down by the third installment.

I was expecting to really like this book as the plot appealed to me, sort of a more cut throat version of Harry Potter, and I really enjoyed one of the author's other works, the Temeraire series. But I must say I found myself struggling to stay interested, it was very easy to put this book down, and there was no urgency to pick it back up, which is not a good sign for me. I don't think I will be reading the books that follow.

I wished for this book over three years ago and was just now given a copy I'm no longer interested in reading.