Received ARC from netgalley for review.

A little bit of Hogwarts, and a little bit of the Hunger Games, and a lot of something completely different. I'm ready for the next installment, now!

It's fun world building, and it's not for kids. I'd recommend for 15 and up.

This is my first Naomi Novik read and I have heard so much good about Spinning Silver, so I was excited to dive in.
A Deadly Education is a fun read with a fabulously grey heroine (she's destined to be bad, but tries so hard to be good) and a school you may not want to send your worst enemies to. I loved the magic and set-up, but struggled a little with the characters. Maybe it was the first person pov, but I didn't really care for Orion.
Overall it dragged a bit for me, but that could very well have to do with my current state of mind (and the state of the world). I am looking forward to re-reading and probably loving it more the second time.

Galadriel ("El" for short) is a potenial "dark witch of apocalyptic proportions" enrolled in the Scholomance, a school for witches and wizards. El's power attracts endless hordes of hungry monsters, so she can't stay with her mum in a yurt in a Welsh commune. All El wants is a clean room a quiet spot in the library to study without being disturbed, and most of all, to be left alone. Sarcastic, rebellious, and downright pissed off, El is more Lizabeth Salander than Hermione Granger.

Naomi Novik's new YA fantasy, "A Deadly Education," starts off with weird jargon, but all becomes clear as you roll with it. At first the book is a chuckler, full of humorous dialogue as El angrily rejects both the irritating fellow student Orion who seems to have a crush on her and the inequality of the whole school setup, in which legacy students from powerful wizard enclaves have all the advantages. El hates this whole scene and angrily rejects it, along with her destiny as the chosen one (to destroy everything with her dark powers).

"A Deadly Education" is a high school clique drama with monsters and an oddball anti-romance, until El finds a mysterious spell book in the library—or does the book find her? In this quirky cast of reluctant allies, El is by far the most reluctant, but she slowly transforms from an outcast into a leader. The book bolts full steam into band-of-gritty-survivors territory, and an epic battle ensues. The message: only those who challenge existing structures can see their way clear to creating new ones.

A fun read, plot-driven and short on explanations, sometimes a too bit short for my taste: I was confused about the battle plan at the beginning of the epic battle. Not in the same class as the author's brilliant "Uprooted," but with YA it's good to dial it up a notch, and I liked it as much as "Spinning Silver." El is a spunky and relatable teenaged witch, and her stream-of-consciousness couldn't be more entertaining. Recommended for teens and adults who like their fantasy light and funny.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher and was encouraged to submit a review.

Magic. Monsters. Graduation? Welcome to the Scholomance, where your best chance of survival depends not only on passing your exams but how well you use every advantage you can by gathering spells, making deals, and forming alliances. And always, always, staying on guard. With a smart, determined heroine who has massive dark power at her fingertips, this is one magical adventure you won’t want to miss.
#ADeadlyEducation #NetGalley

This is frequently going to be compared to Harry Potter, but the similarities end after magic school. This is no Hogwarts. The Scholomance is an extraordinarily deadly school that, in a sense, is trying to "eat" its students. This is a school where doing well on exams and submitting homework on time is literally life or death. Add to that untold numbers of starving monsters that are attracted to magic as well as a lack of teachers or adult caretakers, I would say this is more of a Hunger Games type situation. The students have to bargain knowledge, talents, or the promise of future payoff to make deals within the school for supplies, an exchange of spells, or acceptance into an enclave (which is basically a faction).

Enter El, short for Galadriel, our awesome, very snarky, main character. She is an extraordinarily powerful witch who has the potential to become a dark sorceress capable of unimaginable evil. Because of this, she is almost universally hated and left alone which makes her experience at the Scholomance much more dangerous. Her goal is to demonstrate her value to the most powerful enclaves in the school and hopefully impress an invitation to join from one of them. Making that difficult for her to pull off is Orion, the beloved hero of the school and member of the most coveted enclave.

I couldn't put this down! I loved El, her internal growth, and her desire to remain good despite the intrinsic nature of her powers and the school itself constantly pushing her towards evil. I enjoyed watching her eventual friendship with Orion form, and how, because of her own experiences, she was able to see past the golden boy image to his vulnerability. She also made amazing friendships with two other girls from her year through hard work and a consistent demonstration of trust.

I can't wait for the second book in the series! In the meantime, I'm going to check out more of Naomi Naovik's catalog.

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy!

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
This is the first Naomi Novik book I have read and I can not wait to read her other books. The description for this book sounded interested but I was a bit iffy on it for the first few chapters and didn't really know what to expect. However, after those first few chapters I was completely hooked. The characters quickly grow on you and before I even realized it had happened I found myself tearing up for our protagonist and rooting for her all the way. The book features a diverse and interesting cast and the story moves along quickly and kept me throughly engaged. I am eagerly awaiting the second book now!
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik will be published September 29, 2020.
Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey Books for the eARC.
#ADeadlyEducation #NaomiNovik #NetGalley # DelReyBooks

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is actually the first book by Novik that I have ever read, and now I’m ready to dive into more. I blew through this one and definitely struggled to put it down. The Scholomance makes Hogwarts look tame. The school for teen wizards is literally suspended in a black void that will drive you mad if happen to slip into it. Plus, there are monsters literally everywhere trying to eat you. Want some food? Look for monsters first. Need to go to class? The buddy system is a must and you never want to be the first in. And in this school, being in with the right group can save your life, literally. In the midst of all this is the main character, Galadriel or El to those who know her well, which is not many. El is surly and sarcastic, but somehow still endearing as she struggles to survive a school that seems determined to either take her out or make her the worst version of herself. El’s constantly fighting an inner struggle not to succumb and take the easy path, which for her include mass murder and mayhem and the struggle is made harder when the Scholomance is sending her spells only built for destruction even when she asks for a simple cleaning spell. While she struggles to stay in one piece and not go to the dark side, she also tries to navigate school cliques and teenage friendships in this oh so delightful environment. This is one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and I look forward to exploring more of Novik’s books.

I read this as fast as I could and then almost immediately read it again. It's that good. It's Harry Potter mixed with Sunshine (Robin McKinley), Dexter, and a monster-killing video game, with all the brilliant plotting and character development of Novik's previous books. It's Galadriel's ring-rejection speech from Lord of the Rings in the form of a coming-of-age novel. It's the best book I've read this year and I'm planning to spend the rest of the year telling other people to read it.

This book got on my radar because of the Day of Dialog webinars, when the author said she was most curious about the body count in the Harry Potter books. Imagine, if you will, that this book is essentially about witches whose school is actively trying to eat them. The book looks like it's being marketed for an adult audience, but it is solidly Young Adult, due to the pacing, the ages of the main characters (juniors in high school!), and the overall plotting. It takes place at a magical boarding school!

Thank you to Ballantine and Netgalley for this digital ARC.

So this was one of those hard to put down books and I look forward to volume 2. I loved the dark world which the author has created. I think the nature of our main character who is trying to possibly trying to change her fate is very good. I cannot recommend this book enough. It was a great book that those who want the intersection of Harry Potter and the Magicians will love.

I was really excited to read this because I loved Spinning Silver and Uprooted, and this book is so different that I was a little slow to warm up to it. I found the beginning a little confusing and could have used a bit of explanation of mana and malia to get me started, but it all became clear as I read. I was also slow to warm up to El because she is aggressively unlikable, or seems to be, until we start to get a glimpse of who she might be if she didn't have to fight for every single scrap of safety and even the barest forms of comfort. I never fell in love with her the way I did Miryem or Agnieszka, I did start to understand her and root for her.

The diversity of the characters in this book is really handled in an interesting way that allows for some unusual treatment of the issues of class and race. The Scholomance is an international school with students from all over the world. The privileged come from enclaves, and students from the same enclave tend to stick together inside for mutual protection and benefits, while those from non-enclave families are forced to form alliances or be picked off by the dangerous creatures that roam the school. So while there is a New York enclave and a London one, there are also powerful enclaves from non-western countires, and the result is that no particular culture feels centered in the way that usually happens. El is unique in all of this because she in not from an enclave, but her mother is well known for being a Welsh healer. El keeps her mother's identity a secret because she has an inherently opposite nature that causes people to instinctively dislike her, and having them also be confused and disappointed by her because she's not like her mother would be too much. She also has to spend most of her energy fighting the negative energy she attracts and trying to disprove (to herself) her great-grandmother's prophecy that she is evil and will destroy the world.

I have seen some discussion about whether it was appropriate for Novik to write a half-Indian character, and whether white authors see bi-racial characters as an "in" for writing "out of their lane." I won't presume to speak to that, or to the specific question of why Novik chose to write a character with this particular heritage, but I will say it feels important to me that this character was not white for a specific reason. If El had been written as white, this could have easliy been held up as a story of how "white people suffer from discrimination too" or how being poor and white is "just as bad" as being black or brown. El is never presented as representing specific aspects of Indian culture because she didn't grow up in it, although she does learn and study the language of her father's family. Instead she seems to embody an intersection of many different ways a person can find themselves on the wrong end of systemic injustice as well as people's personal biases and instinctive dislike of her because of who she inherently is. She has received and internalized the constant message that everything about her is wrong, with only her mother fighting to contradict that idea, for her entire life.

My favorite parts of this book are about how El has to work to stop seeing every personal interaction as a bargaining session in which she struggles to offer anything that might balance out how awful she supposedly is. She really doesn't fit in anywhere until she slowly assembles a small group of real friends and very tentatively learns to trust them and the idea that they value her in a way that isn't transactional. Unfortunately I think this is shown less successfully with Orion, the potential hate-to-love interest, than with her other friends. I would have liked to see a little more complexity and depth in Orion's character so I could feel more invested in their budding relationship. While El is adept at recognizing his privilege and showing it to him, I'd like to see more of him really processing that information and talking about it at least a little. However, overall I think this is a good start to a series and I'm excited to read the next book.

The Scholomance is a secret school for young wizards that exists slightly in the real world but mostly in the void. Wizards are kept inside the school for four years as their dorm rooms rotate downwards in an ever-more-dangerous spiral. Attendance at the Scholomance, however, is not free; it feeds off of those that fall prey to the resident monsters.

Galadriel is a young wizard who has been marked with an affinity for death and mass destruction. She has worked hard over her three years in the Scholomance to keep knowledge of her true power a secret from her classmates. As Galadriel and her class approach graduation, she befriends class hero Orion Lake and has a harder and harder time keeping her secret.

This is the beginning of what will be a series by Naomi Novik, and I can't wait for the next book. The characters are likable, complex, and interesting. The story is dark enough that it doesn't feel like a child's tale, and Naomi Novik's world-building is (once again) superb. I do prefer Novik's fractured fairytales, but that comes simply down to personal genre preference. "A Deadly Education" stands up extremely well to Novik's previous work and will be a delight to read for anyone who needs a little magical excitement in their lives.

Well, this was a hell of a good time. I had my doubts for a second there, because I was kind of hoping for something more in the vein of "Spinning Silver," but once I accepted that that was not the kind of book this was it was kind of hard not to love it for the entertainment it delivered. At first, it reminded me a bit of Blue Exorcist or Soul Eater: it's definitely in that anime vein of one insane monster-creature after another, barely pausing for breath - especially in the beginning. And I do believe that's what first captured me - the full throttle-ness of it - but by the end I was there, 100%, for the characters. I really came to love El as a narrator and enjoyed watching her developing relationships with the other students (Orion especially, natch), and was really pleased with where she ended up by the end. Novik does some really cool things re: subverting expectations about the character types here, so much so that when we got to that last wham line of the book I literally gasped out loud.

Now, are there issues here? Yeah. There are for sure way too many info dumps throughout the entirety of the book. The saving grace - for me, at least - was that 8 out of 10 info dumps tended to be interesting. But some of them, especially towards the end, were a touch redundant and, I felt, could have been trimmed or eliminated entirely. But honestly if you're hooked into the story enough (as I was) they don't really diminish the enjoyment of it that much. I mean...I'm definitely coming back for the next installment. This world and these characters are too fun to not want another book with. I believe if you go into this book expecting a good time (and not something like "Spinning Silver" or "Uprooted") you'll definitely enjoy this.

(This review will also be posted on Goodreads.)

With a snarky main character and great world-building within our actual world, this book is perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and The Magicians. Novik creates a system of magic that actually makes physical sense and has somehow come up with a magical world that I don't want to be a part of but that I love reading about. It's labelled as Adult, but I could give this to someone who is 16+.

Welcome to the Scholomance, an automated school of magic where thousands of budding wizards learn how to use their powers while trying not to get devoured by ravenous monsters. It is a desperate existence, but the darkness is tempered by the sarcastic voice with which the story is told. We see the world through the eyes of Galadriel, or El, whom fate is trying to force down a path of power, destruction and pain, but who really wants to make some friends and be accepted by her peers. Opposite El is Orion, the shining star of the Scholomance, adored by all; but is Orion really the mortal enemy that El believes him to be? Naomi Novik takes the familiar “school of magic” trope and plays an intriguing game with it in A Deadly Education, conducting a conversation on power and privilege, friends and enemies, and working together versus going it alone. Fans of dark humor, magic school narratives, and excellent character development will enjoy A Deadly Education, and will be impatiently waiting the next installment in this new series.

This was not what I was expecting it to be. I’m very used to Novak’s writing with her fairy tale like stories. So Spinning Silver and Uprooted. They are probably my two favorite books. A Deadly Education is nothing like them. Even though there was so many possibilities of, well death, I had a fun time reading this. I loved the characters, the world, and how the magic worked. Novak did it again by getting me to love her words and I can’t wait for her next book.

I thought this was a great beginning to a series. I'm excited for the next installment. This is the first book I've read by this author, but I'm definitely going to pick up some of her other books now.

It has been ages since I read a young adult book, and perhaps longer since I read anything in the "magic school" sort of genre. I hate Harry Potter, so I was really pleased that the blurb mentioned that this school wasn't anything like Hogwarts. And it certainly isn't! There is some really fun world-building, both of the inner workings inside the school and the wider world of magic outside it. I found the writing really engaging, and I certainly related more than a little to the main character. I will definitely read more of the series and also pick up some of Novik's other books!

A Deadly Education kicks off a new fantasy series by Naomi Novik. Take the magical school trope and combine it with survival of the fittest with a main character with the ability to destroy the planet.

El, short for Galadriel, grew up in a commune with her hippie healer mom. Unfortunately, El’s magical affinity is for dark magic. Plus she’s a snarky, prickly hedgehog of a human. And it’s possible that she’s going to destroy the world. So not many friends.

El is a student at The Scholomance, a magical school existing in a void cutoff from the regular world. The school is full of magical creatures constantly trying to kill the students. It’s not even safe to brush your teeth alone. And no one leaves their rooms after lights out.

Unsurprisingly, students band together for protection. But El’s natural reserve plus students’ suspicions about her dark magic make alliances hard and friendships even harder.

Until her junior year when her snarky ways attract the friendship of the most talented and popular student in the junior class, Orion. He’s all of the things El isn’t - white, privileged, well connected, wealthy. Onc Orion starts sitting with her at lunch and sitting with her in the library, other students start to accept her. Which is what she’s always wanted, right?

I appreciate how the author’s created a diverse group of characters and works socioeconomic observations into the story. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next book.

Thank you NetGalley and Del Rey for the DRC.

I'm a fan of Naomi Novik but I'm surprised with how much I loved this book.

Galadriel (her mother being the type of person who names her daughter after a Lord of the Rings character) has an affinity for evil spells. If she wants to learn how to create flame, she can end up burning down a building if she's not careful. However, her mother has raised her with love and empathy so El is careful with her spell casting. She does understand people being bad. Unfortunately, people sense something is off with her and she's an outcast in a school where if you're not careful, monsters will eat you.

I love El. She's prickly and smart. I loved reading her thought process when she's facing a moral crossroads. The world she lives in is very cruel and unfair. There is a prophecy that makes it seem that she will end the world. However, if she wants to end how classist their society is then there's nothing evil about her.

Watching her gain friends was well written journey. She had to trust that people will help her without any profit.

I'm going to sit here and be sad that I have to wait for the next book in the series.