No spoiler review: You know a book is good when you’re done and immediately start social media stalking the author for clues on when the next book is being released. Naomi Novik did this with The Last Graduate and I have been counting the days until I have Book 3 in my hands.

From the first time I saw the cover of A Deadly Education I was intrigued, and even more so after reading the blurb. I started the first book after the second one was already out, and I'm glad I did.

The first book was good, but I saw a lot of potential not explored, and that's why having the opportunity of starting The Last Graduate soon after finishing A Deadly Education was so important. The first book is good, the second one is great.

The character development was a deciding factor for me while rating The Last Graduate, and I feel like The Golden Enclaves will follow the same pattern and be better than the last book in the trilogy, for the same reason.

The cliff hanger in the very end of The Last Graduate had me feeling breathless and in NEED of the last book, I'm really happy I won't have to wait very long for it.

꧁ℝ𝔼𝕍𝕀𝔼𝕎꧂
The Last Graduate
By: Naomi Novik
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Immediate reaction: AHHHH!!!
The Cliff Hanger on this is going to stick with me for a while. The first half of the book was a little slow but the second half was packed with action and I loved all of the characters!
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The Scholomance is a school for magical children, but it isn’t perfect. There are Mals that attack anyone with magic, and the school can’t keep them all away from the students.
1 in 7 students will die over their 4 years. But those are better odds than being out in the world.
Galadriel has been a loner her entire time at the school. It has something to do with the fact that she is evil, and people can tell just by being close to her that she could murder them with just a thought. Until she met Orion.
If Orion and El team up can they help the entire school? How many other students will have to help to make their plans work?
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Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with a copy.
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Rating: 4/5
Smut: 1/5
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Can we talk about that ending??? We need the next book NOW! Naomi Novik does it again with a spectacular story that draws you in from the very beginning.

I don't really understand the point of this book. There are a lot of info dumps that have zero impact on the story. We don't learn anything new, the characters don't grow, the status quo essentially remains the same.

what a fantastic second book for this series!!
I really enjoy the world-building in this series, its engaging and interestng. The concept of a sentient(ish) school that magic-users have to navigate, all while learning all their lessons, seems quite unique.
The people interactions feel true-to-life (if I was fighting for my life, I'd be trepidatious of forming actual friendships, rather than alliances.
The pace of this book is great, fast and lots of action. Lots of attention is given to small details (what kind of baddies do they need to pick out of their food?).
Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book, maybe even more than the first. But now I need book three!!

I loved this book. The first one was a ton of world building and this one allowed you to just drop back into this wonderful world of dark academia. El is the reluctant hero I was dreaming of when I started this book and I can not wait for the next one!

One of the things I love about a Naomi Novik book is that they're all so different (outside of the series.) I had to re-read Deadly Education to refresh my memory before beginning this one, and I love that the tone of this series is so different from the Tremeraire series, yet they and her other titles are all equally fantastic. Spinning Silver is my favorite, but the Scholomance series is a close second.

The world-building is so complex and vivid I already had a good image of the Scholomance before I even glanced at the accompanying illustration. I love that the heroine, El, is hostile and deliberately repellant but still manages to acquire fans and find a tribe. One of my favorite parts of the story is when El is baffled by another student's ability to appear nice, despite the fact that she's just as abrasive as El. I love a cranky, reluctant heroine! The only part of the book that didn't completely gel for me was El's relationship with Orion. It wasn't really clear why she liked him, other than he was there and she was unable to frighten him off, so the relationship felt a bit shallow. Overall, I loved the book. It was fast-paced, fantastic character development, superb world-building, and just a great story. Naomi Novik's books have become a staple in my DnD book club, and this will be another great title for us. The cliffhanger at the end is brutal! I can't wait for Golden Enclaves.

I enjoyed this title but I find it a little wordy. It's certainly a compelling story line. I look forward to seeing how the series concludes.

Excellent continuation of the series! Excited to pick up the last one as well. Would recommend for people who don't mind lengthy internal monologues.

A very enjoyable sequel. I love the emphasis on real friendship in the middle of the school trying to kill everyone. Also I can’t with that ending!

I’ve loved Naomi Novik’s work since discovering her “Napoleonic Wars With Dragons” series (Temeraire). It seemed to me that with each book, both in that series and more recent publications, she has grown in skill and depth. I read the first two volumes of “Scholomance” back-to-back. It’s fair to say I inhaled them, they were so good.

I’ve been reading a bunch of magical school stories recently, and the Scholomance books redefine the genre. Many of the other books use a boarding school-like setting, whether it’s Hogwarts or the school of magical juvenile delinquents in Promise Me Nothing, by Dawn Vogel or the more troubled environment of D. R. Perry’s Sorrow and Joy. The schools and their teachers are charged with educating (and sometimes reforming) their students. Not so the Scholomance. Created by elite wizards to protect their adolescent offspring from being the prime targets of supernatural nasties (“maleficaria”), the school exists in a pocket carved out of the void, with only a narrow access to the outer world. There are no teachers, mail service or messengers except to a limited degree the incoming freshman classes, and the school may be sentient, trying to do its job regardless of the cost. Students take their classes as seriously as if their lives depended upon them, which they do. At the end of the senior year, the doors of the graduation hall open and all the incoming and resident nasties flood in, forming a gauntlet that only a few students survive. Even so, their odds are better than if the kids had stayed at home.

Into this world comes Galadriel (who hates her name, so she’s “El”), daughter of an unrepentant hippie witch who lives in a yurt in Wales (wrap your mind around that!) and gives away her best spells for free in a world of precisely measured tit-for-tat. A prophecy has marked El as destined for destruction and dark magic, and she’s become a self-isolating pariah noted for her uncensored rudeness. When heroic Orion Lake keeps saving her life, she can’t get rid of him. Gradually, they become friends (and more than friends). Much to her amazements, El gathers together a small team of fellow students, since cooperation and coordination will provide their only hope for surviving the graduation ordeal. At the end of their junior year, El and her friends joined forces with the graduating seniors, with surprising success.

Now it’s their turn, as graduating seniors. El has grown from a grouchy recluse to a young woman of courage and compassion, a born leader. She can inspire, cajole, and persuade the other seniors to work together to save the entire class, but that will leave successive generations of students to face the same heavy mortality. El wants to save them all and put an end to the yearly massacre. She comes up with a plan to graduate every single student, culminating in a mass extinction of the maleficaria. Her scheme will take every scrap of ingenuity, persuasion, and sheer magical power she possesses. To make matters worse, the school itself seems to have turned against her.

Novik combines a different and much grittier take on the “magical school” trope with a compelling central character who changes and grows. El faces her fears and insecurities, as well as the temptation of evil sorcery, to become a passionate and compassionate leader. Her voice drives the movement of the books. I can hardly wait to see what impossible-seeming tasks she tackles next!

What did we do to deserve that ending? Why did Naomi Novik betray us in this way? Oh well, it was worth it. Need the next installment NOW.

I loved this sequel! I am on tenderhooks waiting for the final book in the trilogy. El's emotional development has been slow-burn and so worth it. She is comically bad at interpersonal relations, but finally realizes the value of her friends and how she can depend on them. Her relationship with Orion develops slowly and realistically. The cliffhanger....

Many thanks to Netgalley, Random House Publishing Group and the author for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Last graduate starts exactly where The Deadly education left off. With the graduation coming upon them, El, her friends and acquaintances have no choice but to prepare so as to save their lives and the one's of kids who will follow them next year. The enclave politics is much more apparent in this book and the magic system of the Scholomance is more clearer, (I still have a 100 questions though). And the race to live is real.

The things I loved about this book is El's Sarcasm, and the tiny character arc of her coming out of her self-exclusion and shell, and that's about it. The supporting characters had way better exposure in this book than the first, even though the whole descriptive inner monologue that haunted me in the first book was still present. Orion was the exact same 'golden retriever' dumb, annoying kid, he was in TDE.

I have the exact same issues I had with TDE with this one as well. EL is a half Indian, half American protagonist. She is said to be fluent in Marathi and Hindi. But not once do we hear her talking or creating a spell in either of these languages. Then we also have the case of the spell at the end of the book which is in Mandarin but we have to imagine it happening in the background, which means there is no atmospheric build up, and it all falls flat. The lack of background research into the multiple cultures, and languages of the different students who grace is story is stark and vivid . Don't even get me started on the one off-chance, words from other languages are mentioned in book and context is just….ughhh…frustrating.

Even with all of these flaws, I will have you know that I will be reading the third book purely for the sake of the cliffhanger (also the reason why I read this one), which was very much in the lines of Ninth House. (iykyk)

The Last Graduate is the second book in Naomi Novik's Scholomance series.
In this book, El is in her senior year. She must find a way to make it out of the school alive, along with her group and Orion. Along the way, she learns more about her abilities and begins to become more comfortable with them.
I found this book very exciting. Novik continued to expand her world building, and develop her characters. I loved seeing El become comfortable with herself, and learn to understand the school.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting new fantasy, with a fun protagonist.

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik, if you haven't started this series yet, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?! Seriously though one of the best series in a long while, can't wait for the third installment.

THE ENDING. THE ENDING?! I AM UNWELL.

the last 30% of this book is where all the action is, and there's a lot. I feel like I want to give it 4 stars because I had such visceral reaction over the way this went (I get it but I was shocked) but it was so incredibly dense it took forever to get through to that point and put me into a major slump. Please for the love of all that is good give us some dialogue. 3.5 🌟 and I can't wait for the next one!

Thank you to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for this digital copy!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read A Deadly Education early in 2021, so I cannot admit to remembering all of the finer points of the story. the story jumps right in where the first book left off, but then gets a bit repetitive until the last 3 chapters when things really pick up. The story also tends to trail off in random tangents at time that help with world building, but don’t necessarily move the plot along.

The relationship between El and Orion seems almost completely lost in this book. Orion is merely a side character that pops in at random.. Of course there was a lot more for El to think about and do throughout the context of the book than to only think about Orion, but it just seemed to be thrown in as an afterthought. I really enjoyed their growth in the first book and wished that I could have seen them grow more together during this book. It certainly would have set up for the final installment better in my mind.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley. This review contains some mild spoilers.

The Last Graduate leaves off exactly where A Deadly Education left off, but now with the ticking clock of graduation hanging over the heads of our protagonist and her friends. This book is so strong and so enjoyable, and it’s very easy to keep falling in love with Galadriel. In The Last Graduate, she continues her journey from being an ill-fated loner to having a loving group of friends around her while they’re threatened on all sides from the mals living within the school. This year, though, El and Orion team up together to save everyone in the school both from the mals in the classrooms but also the graduation hall. It is very fun to see El go from being grumpy at Orion being a hero, to becoming an extremely begrudging hero herself.

The enclave politics become more compelling in this book, as it becomes evident that something is destroying enclaves outside of the Scholomance, but our protagonists are trying to discover what it is while cut off from the outside world. El also is juggling this mystery during a time when the Scholomance seems determined to attack her specifically.

Other fun things include: The introduction of a magical gymnasium where alliances can train for graduation. The appearance of this gym and its lore was a surprise, but it quickly became a favorite feature of the book for me. I do really enjoy multi-purpose rooms that can change shape depending on who is using it.

I have read some reviews that complain about excessive explanations of world details, and there are times when it can halt the narrative for a little too long. However, the details of the world both inside and out give it a very well fleshed-out feeling, and it becomes much easier to engage in the mystery-solving element and to develop theories. I deeply enjoyed all the details and El’s perspective on them.

The origin story of the Scholomance is addressed in more detail here, but it introduces some notable inconsistencies and mysteries. Namely, why on earth was this school created when it is equally dangerous as being on the outside, and why would (especially) enclavers send their children to this place to be killed rather than protect them in their enclaves? It gives the impression that A Deadly Education came first, and the origin story was created afterward. It is a challenge to see how this inconsistency could be explained or justified in the third book, but I’m still cautiously optimistic!

Also…THAT ENDING. It was incredible, it made me shout out loud. Cannot wait for the next installment!