Naomi Novik's second installment in the Scholomance series is a blast. It picks up directly after A Deadly Education and continues the adventures of the protagonist, 17-year-old El. While the Scholomance series has flaws--excessive exposition, repetition, the underwritten romantic relationship--the series is *just so fun*. Novik is an outstanding world-builder. Unsurprisingly, the Scholomance series often reminds me of the Harry Potter series, in that I will forgive it a great deal just for the opportunity to spend more time in the world Novik creates. In The Last Graduate, Novik shows El's emotional growth and her transition into being a more ethical person. I hope that the third book in the series allows her to find some sort of personal fulfillment. I have no doubt that Novik will keep me turning the pages either way.

This is the second book of the Scholomance trilogy, which takes up immediately where “A Deadly Education” left off.

Galadriel, known as El, is now 17 and a senior in the Scholomance for sorcerers, a sentient boarding school sort of like a very dark version of Hogwarts.   Every day in the school the students - more than 4,000 of them - face an obstacle course full of monsters (“maleficaria” or “mals”) trying to kill and eat them.  “Graduation” is the final big test, when, in order to get out of the school, they have to run through a gauntlet of all the hungry mals lying in wait; less than a quarter of the class is ever expected to survive.  El thinks this isn't so bad; she calculates that if you’re an indie kid like she is (not part of an enclave of other wizards), and you don’t get into the Scholomance, your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty.  Thus, “one in four is plenty decent odds compared to that.”

Students try to make alliances to help protect one another because they basically have to in order to survive, so everything becomes transactional - e.g., I will pry a tray of food away from grasping mals for you in the cafeteria if you get them away from a place to sit at a table.

El never had friends before, but now she is an important part of an alliance, and even has a boyfriend, Orion Lake. Together, El and Orion are considered among the most important students in the school: Orion has an ability to destroy most of the mals that roam through the school, and El has the ability to destroy, well, everything, is she wants to.

The modus operandi at the Scholomance has always been to look out for yourself and your own survival first, only giving as much as you have to in order to ensure that occurs. Alas, having friends and relationships has created in El the inconvenient tendency to start to care about others, and whether they survive. This makes her, in her own (previous) estimation, a “complete numpty.” But the appeal of not being alone anymore is more powerful than any magic she knows. It saves her, and she wants to save everyone else in return. She finds herself copycatting Orion’s “stupid noble-hero routine” and so the school comes after her - sending mals after her alone. But then she discovers what the school really wants from her. The question is, can she get all the other students to go along with it, even if it means taking risks for others besides yourself with no payoff?

Evaluation: As the days flew by to the big graduation test of survival, I found myself flying through the pages as well. And wow, what an ending! I can’t wait for the third book!

Oh wow, this was good. I expected to be entertained, because I was definitely engrossed by A Deadly Education, but this book went well above and beyond the first in the series. I enjoyed A Deadly Education because of how darkly delightful it was: it felt a bit like a monster-centric anime to me: high-octane, heavy on the world-building, with lots of cool twists and turns. Well, The Last Graduate is all of that plus magnificent character arcs (and an amazing plot arc that's way too spoilery to discuss here). Not saying that the first book didn't have good characterization - it would be impossible to enjoy reading it without being invested in El's Elness - but it felt like that book was more about setting up the characterization pay-off in this one. Novik does some really, really interesting things with one character in particular that leveled up this book even more for me.

Now, does this book, like the first one have infodumps, weird pacing decisions, and a steady stream of incredibly unwieldy sentences? Oh, yes. But they happen a degree less than they did in A Deadly Education, so if you're anything like me you'll be able to overlook them in favor of every other amazing thing going on. And I definitely did think of this book as amazing: it was hard for me to pull myself away from it, and I kept thinking about it when I wasn't reading it - a rarity.

If you've already tried this series you probably already know how you'll feel about it. If you haven't, and you're looking for some good, dark fantasy fun, look no further. This is it.

This was a great sequel to A Deadly Education. It was exciting and fun. It’s an exciting new point of view for a magic school, a great contrast to books like Vampire Academy and Harry Potter.

Free Netgalley book for review~ I stayed up way too late finishing this book. Gah. Just for that ending. And goodness knows when the next book will be published—I thought this was a duology.

It does drag a little bit in the middle, imo, with a fair bit of time spent on gym class, but it’s still entertaining.

If you liked the first book, this is a fun read but it ends in a MASSIVE CLIFFHANGER. So if you’re on the fence I’d recommend waiting until book 3 (???) shows up.

Naomi Novik builds such imaginative and captivating worlds, and The Last Graduate does an amazing job of plot continuation and world-building in this second book from her Schoolomance series. It is honestly a huge challenge to NOT get sucked into the pages or put this book down! I immensely enjoyed the growth and maturation of my favorite acerbic leading young lady, Galadriel. The Last Graduate is a phenomenal book. I cannot recommend this series enough!! I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to read this ARC.

So, seriously, my only complaint is that I have to wait for book three for HOW LONG?? I need to know how this is all going to go! Novik throws you right back into the action, no deep breaths, no nice long summer break for the students to relax and build up their strength. El's growth is exponential in The Last Graduate. She's still the same snarky, sarcastic girl you know and love, but she's letting that tough exterior shell crack enough to let in her new friends and maybe boyfriend. I really like the additional background offered for the Enclaves and how the home politics rules over nearly every aspect of students' school experience. All the action and relationships are deeper in this sequel, at one point it's practically frantic.

I did get a little bogged down about halfway through, I felt like there was maybe too much detail and exposition, but the further I got into the plot the more it all tied together. I needed all those details to truly appreciate the effort the seniors had to put forth and what ultimately was at stake. I thoroughly enjoyed this continuation and look forward to being able to get my greedy hands on book three!

This book captured me: hook, line, and sinker. I could not put it down for 2 days, trying to learn what happened to these poor, lucky, optimistic, broken students. It cannot be easy to write any kind of new magical school series in the shadow of Rowling, but this story is so hauntingly fresh that you won't find yourself too hung up comparing the scars of these endangered kids with a certain lightning bolt. This book did a good job of stretching the magic from book 1 without the system breaking down which is always a challenge. Additionally, the narration really did feel like being inside of the head of younger character, she is exceptional in her magic, but rather ordinary in terms of her maturity.. I can't wait to see where we go form here. (That cliffhanger was cruel though).

There was a lot of tell not show and retread in the beginning. But then...oh then. The book really took off and there was actual character growth and my MVP of familiars, Precious. The ending though. Literally still stuck with what the last ending meant so now I'm stuck with two cliffhangers that I actually need to understand. Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the ARC.

Sequels are hard, but this book took the themes of A Deadly Education and deepened them into what feels like a fully formed continuation of a story. I was caught up in this book very intensely and rooting so hard for El and her friends. However I did notice that there were a few rough parts here and there were El's internal monologue can go on for so long as to break up the conversation being portrayed.
That said I would highly recommend not reading this book until the third book in this trilogy is published. I won't say more than that, but trust me, wait to read this until you already have the final book in your hands, you will thank me.

Like all of Naomi Novak's books, The Last Graudate is compulsively readable and hard to put down. Book two continues consistently developing the world of the Scholomance and its inhabitants, as well as the themes of class division and global politics. A must read for fans of magic schools on the dark side; Vita Nostra meets The Call but completely unique in its own right. I cannot wait until the third book in this series.

** spoiler alert ** WTF I thought there were only two of these… cliffhanger! Ugh! So good though. I really love these characters and story, but that ending almost killed me.

The Last Graduate takes up where the first book left off, the 2nd year at the Scholomance. This year El is feeling so sure of her powers and skills that her fondness for the underdog leads her to the crazy notion - We'll save EVERYONE this year! And this is the seeming trajectory of the story, with the usual hiccups and demons and backstabbing along the way. The characters continue to develop - themselves and their relationships. El especially learns about this thing called Trust. And Friendship. She'd heard of them before, but..... Once again, the grand finale is graduation and Novik has a twist/cliffhanger that is leaving fans crazy. It left me annoyed, because (and I'm trying for no spoilers here) as I read El's plans, the subsequent actions are quite pointless. So arghh! Otherwise I found this great fun, completely dependent on the first book, excellent character development, but the plot not as involving as the first book. Highly recommended, looking forward to the third and a worthy explanation of that cliffhanger.

Last year, Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education introduced a complicated, dangerous world. In Novik's Earth, desperate parents fight for slots to the Scholomance school. At the Scholomance, if their magic-imbued children can learn skills to survive (and build the right alliances), they may live past graduation.

It's a harsh and unforgiving reality that forces children to adapt to combat conditions so they won't perish from the onslaught of "mals," demons hunting the precious mana carried by members of magic families. Survival rates are poor and the Scholomance is a long-shot hope, especially for those students from families outside the hard-to-join magic enclaves, homes to the rich and privileged members of the magic world.

The Scholomance school was built to be a refuge, for protecting the youth as they learned critical skills. In reality, it is running on fumes and barely operational. It does little to protect its students as mana-hunting monsters roam the halls, the duct system, the cafeteria, and even sneak into the bathrooms and dormitories. Unwary and unlucky students simply don't survive.

Galadriel "El" Higgins is a Wales-based schoolgirl raised by a loving mother. The two lived in a peace-and-love commune that failed to cherish her in any way. As a result, El is a prickly, snarky protagonist, who hesitates to connect with others. Deeply gifted, she's been rejected by nearly everyone she's encountered (outside her Mum) due to her unusual magic profile, which leans more naturally towards dark evil sorceress than happy fairy princess. Determined not to give into those natural inclinations, she is just as busy fending off the hoards of evil spells that fall into her hands as she is to learning basic survival.

Book 1 was a marvel. We first met El in her Junior year, where she tentatively formed her first friendships among her peers. She also established an intriguing relationship with the hunky and powerful Orion Lake, the school hero, who was busy saving, well, everyone.

Orion spent his time hunting the mals who, in turn, were busy killing students and harvesting their mana. At great personal risk, El and Orion helped the Senior class clear out the graduation hall, so they could escape the school and return home to the real world. Now, in the second book, it's the start of El and Orion's own Senior year and a cautionary message from El's mother hangs over their relationship.

Although you'd expect things to continue just as they left off, The Last Graduate starts surprisingly slowly. It takes nearly a quarter of the book before Orion even shows up in any meaningful way. I wondered at first whether Novik had lost the plot. However, once the first semester midterms pass, events begin to ramp up and the book takes off, meeting the quality and excellence of volume one and, perhaps, surpassing it in ever more surprising ways.

Like book 1, The Last Graduate is a deeply political book, although not tied directly to our reality. There was some controversy surrounding a few offhand references in the first book, which the author has taken great pains to remedy in book two. And, like the first book, The Last Graduate dives into the meaning of privilege and power, and explores what it means to be divested from structural institutional stability.

Without giving much away, there are quite a lot of seemingly false starts as the plot plays out. Certain grand goals fail to pay off. Over time those false starts become essential to Novik's tale. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone picking up book 2 so I'll just say that this progression picks up the central theme of the first book. It emphasizes that it's critical to create friendships and alliances, even in an atmosphere of fear. Reaching out to help those who cannot help themselves is a duty not just a way to self-aggrandize or make use of the desperate from a place of power. A philosophy of help and outreach must reach out to all, not just those closest to you. It's wonderful to explore this viewpoint without the book becoming overly preachy or pulling away from the core adventure.

That's not to say the book does not suffer from some flaws. Chief among these is the incomprehensible hostility from the Shanghai Enclave faction towards El, which creates some plot points that are necessary but built on shaky reasoning. Orion's near absence of character arc until near the end is also an issue, and when his story does pick up, it simplifies his motivations to such a degree that it feels flat compared to the complex, prickly, and wonderfully nuanced El.

All this, both good and bad (but mostly good), leads to an ending that will divide readers. Although the series could end here, as it mirrors history to some extent, it felt unsatisfying to me. I sincerely wish for a book 3 to bring the status quo to a new and more hopeful place.

In the end, outside of the slow start and a few rough patches, The Last Graduate is a tense, exciting rush of a story. Its untraditional lead sparkles and it delivers a feel-good heart-pumping adventure. Recommended.

An advanced-reader-copy was provided for me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Any follow-up to the highest of high bars set by A DEADLY EDUCATION (which was a masterpiece of evocative worldbuilding and complex character building with an archetypal Novik anti-heroine who draws readers in with a love-to-hate becoming a love-to-love in both funny small and huge moments and amazing adventures) would be in a place of a hard act to follow. THE LAST GRADUATE, being a bridge piece in the series, particularly felt like one where the author needed to establish a certain series of events to propel the story arc forward, and the action and adventure certainly did not suffer for it -- at no moment, can a reader feel bored of the events playing out. However, the driving force of the first book was anti-heroine El's emotional anger caused by isolation within the privileged system of the ivory tower hellhole that she's placed in (which rings especially true and has meaningful echoes of the privileged societies of higher and private education academia...). The second book takes place immediately after the events of the first book, and the emotional tone shift can feel a bit abrupt. Feeling intensely the emotional highs and lows of the character's evolution in the first book, THE LAST GRADUATE feels very removed in some ways from the original emotional drive of the main character, and so the emotional revelations needed to establish the events didn't ring quite as true for me, for instance El's evolution to caring and caretaking for other students not in her immediate friendship group in the complex surrounding of the Sholomance, or even further El's emotional developments in the main romantic attraction to Orion.

Typically speaking, this type of character emotional development without accompanying persuasive text (which might otherwise have brought the reader along with El's internal justifications and emotional reactions) would be a markdown of the book's readability and enjoyability. However, this just goes to show how excellent of a writer Novik truly is. Even in a follow-up piece that doesn't emotionally ring as true or deeply impactful as the original, the entertainment of world development and plot exposition is so wonderfully done, it doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the novel -- which is an amazingly rip-roaring good time in line with Novik's other top-line work. Given that A DEADLY EDUCATION felt like an entree in character development and worldbuilding for the highest levels of literary fantasy fiction writing (placing her up with Jacqueline Carey, Robin McKinley, Kristin Cashore), THE LAST GRADUATE feels a bit like a half step back to more high speed entertainment-oriented commercial fiction writing that Novik started from and that much of her recent work has evolved away from (UPROOTED was a particularly awesome entry for those fans of strong non-traditional female characters). One can only hope that future entries in the series will route back the deeply wrought complex emotional lines that felt a bit dangling or hanging in this second book.

Particularly, for my own personal experience as odd-man-out with an APA scholarship experience in private secondary schooling and feeling a deep kinship to the first book (especially prescient since I now have a young child we're debating about sending down a similar private school rabbithole), I'd hoped as a reader that this second book would explore more the opportunity of diverse developing worldbuilding sets in other cultures with secondary characters like Liu and Aadhya coming from such different backgrounds and worlds than the anti-heroine El's magical UK one. However, it seems that might be reserved for future development, as future entries look like they might be established in the outside world with El having (spoiler alert - look away!) 'graduated' with potentially high ambitions at the end of the appropriately titled LAST GRADUATE.

Overall, loved the excellent reading experience THE LAST GRADUATE provided, despite the detraction of the less than persuasive emotional follow-ups, and particularly loved the last cliffhanger ending related to the title. Cannot wait (fingers already twitching on the pre-order button whenever it arrives) to new entries in the series, particularly in development of the main characters' future and romantic entanglements as the series opens up to new worlds and opportunities outside of the domain of the Sholomance -- of course with the hugely rippling effects of what happens in the end to the Sholomance itself. Cannot recommend enough this book and this series in particular to others. If you have not read this yet, buy this book and read A DEADLY EDUCATION first, then buy the next one.

I'm currently still recovering from an absolute banger ending, but I will say that the book overall is a bit mixed. The pacing, especially in the beginning, can get bogged down by entirely too many asides. These can be a trying when it's in the middle of a scene that otherwise showed promise of going somewhere. Since I was already familiar with the world, it felt like things were less fresh in places. I will say I was VERY pleased that the book stayed true to being a lot about the friendships (confirmed found family yesssss), and didn't just become some weird romantic drama. Which is not to say Orion isn't here, he's just the part I care about the least and I'm glad he doesn't dominate the narrative. Anyway! Once we hit the main plot, things got a lot stronger, and I appreciated some of the twists. It did feel a little condensed and I would've liked more dialogue and less El summarizing, but I do appreciate her voice overall so it worked. I certainly couldn't put the book down for the last bit and the ending made me overcome with emotions. This is a book about a grim world where people can be less shitty and help each other! I'm about it! I'm especially interested to see the external world politics in a future book.

I'm not an expert on all of the details, but I do think some of the world building is a little shaky here still. For instance, why is it that the London enclave had the power to make a school but the Shanghai enclave didn't. Is it linked to colonialism? The theft of resources? I have so many questions about how the politics and history outside wizard enclaves affects they way they interact with each other currently. For instance, there are specifically a lot of language politics that would go into the idea that Mandarin Chinese is the only language other than English that one can take all of one's classes in. (I assume that is the dialect she means when she says Chinese, as it appears to be what she's speaking in the the one line she has written out in pinyin.) I'm not saying all of them need to be touched on in the book, I just want to know that the author has taken them into consideration. There were some shaky details about Chinese as a language in the book that made me a little wary, but perhaps they are just editing issues that will be resolved in the print book. I'm willing to hold judgement and am very excited to read the next book

This wasn't quite as strong as the first book, but I think I generally expect that with second books in s trilogy. The last 1/3 of the book really picked up and took off though, and the ending was AMAZING. It's been a while since a book made my heart pound like that, and the cliffhanger was as brutal as it was awesome. Can't wait for book 3!

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine Del Rey and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC!

The Last Graduate is the follow up to A Deadly Education. Both entries in the series so far follow Galadriel, known as “El,” and her attempts to survive schooling in a magical school known as the Scholomance. All young wizards are crammed in this competitive school in England to survive the many maleficarias or “mals,” who are attracted by the mana of young wizards and wish to feast on them. This year, El is a senior, and has to prepare for the most deadly part of her education yet—graduation. Though The Last Graduate has the same quirky and sarcastic narration by El, as well as the same setting, I found that The Last Graduate just didn’t work for me quite as well as its predecessor.

Instead of taking delight in El’s long-winded diatribes about magic, enclaves, maleficarias, or the Scholomance, I found I was incredibly tempted to skim a lot of these descriptions in my read through. Instead of being charming, I found these monologues tedious and incessant; El can literally find anything to dump information about and she certainly doesn’t do it concisely. And most of these things that she endlessly describes aren’t even that pertinent to the story at large or the situation at hand. I am a big highlighter when I read, but to my frustration, it was almost impossible to highlight a mere sentence or two with what I thought might be important later, because all of the sentences of The Last Graduate are incredibly long, usually looking like whole paragraphs. To my dismay, I often ended up with whole pages highlighted.

Now, I’m sure this is the exact same writing style as A Deadly Education, which I gave four stars. So why did it bother me so much in The Last Graduate? I think a big portion of my dislike of the writing style in The Last Graduate came down to the fact that the novelty of the world had worn off for me. I was already familiar with the Scholomance, the magical world, and the maleficaria. Plus, El now had friends and people to talk to, but was still going off on these crazy lectures to the reader about how enclave wars worked, or how food got to the cafeteria in the Scholomance, or why you shouldn’t use bean bag chairs in dorm rooms. And like I said, none of these explanations were short and many of them didn’t feel very important. Plus, not much was going on in The Last Graduate, as maleficarias aren’t attacking as much, and all of the students are focused on one thing and one thing only for the entirety of the novel: graduation.

“I don’t think anyone really knew what to do with themselves. We’ve all spent the best part of four years training as hard as we could to be inhumanely selfish in a way we could only possibly live with because all of us were going round in fear for our lives—if not in the next five minutes then on graduation day at the latest—and you could tell yourself everyone was doing the same and there wasn’t any other choice. The Scholomance had encouraged it if anything.”*

I think my other issue with The Last Graduate was that El was no longer an outcast. Instead, it became widely accepted in the entire school that El is the only way the students have any chance of making it out of graduation alive. I think I just personally related to El more when she was a loner or a loner with one or two friends. It was a lot to wrap my head around how quickly someone who was almost universally despised became the most desired alliance member in the entire school, with pretty small amounts of resistance. And El seemingly took on this new role with relative ease, deciding she will save every last student of the Scholomance. Her hero complex soon became even bigger than Orion Lake’s, who we learn is really just more about killing maleficarias than saving everyone.

“I’d been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I’d been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn’t need this much more to lose.”

Though El still got frustrated sometimes, there’s less sarcasm, outward disgust at weakness, and a lot less of the angry, snarky character I liked in the first novel. I also could not decide if it was in character or out of character for El to ignore her mother’s advice to stay away from Orion Lake. One part of me thought, “yeah, El doesn’t listen to anyone,” but also the other part of me considered that El has always been first and foremost concerned with survival and would never make these kinds of illogical decisions. El also worries frequently (and rightly so), what giving in to her feelings will cost her, and even tries not to be alone with Orion because she doesn’t trust herself not to act on her feelings for him. So when she finally gave in, it didn’t feel like she was making the right decision. I feel that if Orion and El hadn’t acted on their feelings until after graduation, it would have shown that they cared more about each other surviving and their lives together after graduation. Instead, any act of love felt cheap and convenient, with the excuse that they were afraid they were going to die. This was really frustrating to me, because notably El’s dad actually died, during graduation, after getting El’s mom pregnant. So I feel that El should have the brains not to repeat her mother’s mistakes.

“I came in here and I’ve survived in here being sensible all the time, trying to always do the cleverest thing I could manage, to see al the clear and sharp-edged dangers from every angle, so I could just barely squeeze past them without losing too much blood. I could never afford look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyways. I’m too good at being hard, I’ve got so good at it, and I wasn’t going to go soft all of a sudden now.”

But there’s not a lot of learning from example going on with El, which disappointed me. After deliberating, I came to the conclusion that it made some sense for a teenager, who thinks they may not make it alive out of graduation, to throw caution to the wind.. However, I lost a lot of respect for El in her developing relationship with Orion Lake, merely because she stopped thinking with her head and was acting with her heart. As a whole, El was a lot less “intimidating dark sorceress who could destroy the world” and more “typical teenager in love for the first time and making stupid decisions, who just happens to have a lot of magical power.”

Despite being less thrilled with El’s characterization and her relationship with Orion, I still really enjoyed her friendship with Liu and Aadyha. I also really liked that El was forced to get to know a lot of her classmates when working with them to survive graduation. My favorite character by far was the ruthless and abrasive Liesel, who seemed to fill the hole left behind El’s transformation into a possible and very willing martyr. I laughed out loud a lot when Liesel was barking orders, forging alliances, teaching El the proper way to compliment someone in order to forge said alliance, and so on. I hope that this is not the last time I see this character, or someone like her, because she was such a riot.

Less of a riot for me was the shocking cliffhanger ending of The Last Graduate. I even tried to turn the page for more, because I didn’t think The Last Graduate could possibly end on such an abrupt, surprising note. I haven’t definitively decided how I feel about the cliffhanger yet: I’m somewhere between respect to the author, Naomi Novik, for having the guts to end her novel so recklessly and frustration that The Last Graduate ended where and how it did. I can’t believe I have to wait however long until the next novel comes out in the series to find out what happens. This ending cut off The Last Graduate before I could find out what I most want to know from the series, such as, but not limited to these following questions:

Will El really destroy all of the enclaves? And will it be with dark magic, or the fact that she’s magically united everyone by her actions in The Last Graduate?

Will El see her friends again?

Will El’s mom ever approve of Orion?

Is there a better way to keep young wizards safe?

What will El do outside of the Scholomance?

What really happened to the Bangkok Enclave?

Does Precious really have any powers?

I can only hope that a follow up to The Last Graduate will answer these questions and the many others that I have that aren’t spoiler free. Even though the ending was incredibly unexpected and jarring, I think it did increase my interest in reading the next novel, as I found I was woefully indifferent to or undecided on a lot of the events that happened in The Last Graduate. I just hope that it is unlike the ending to A Deadly Education, which felt like a pretty big tease due to the fact that that novel left off at El receiving her mother’s warning to stay away from Orion Lake, only for him to not cause any trouble for most, or all of The Last Graduate (depending on how you view it).

I also could not help but to feel that there wasn’t a whole lot of substance to this novel in other regards as well, as all the characters constantly were focused on preparing for graduation. Though this made sense with what was at stake, it sadly meant that most of The Last Graduate felt solely like filler or mere build up for the next entry in the Scholomance series. And the cliffhanger didn’t help with those feelings, as the novel cut off literally seconds before the next part of El’s journey could begin. However, if you enjoyed A Deadly Education, you will most likely get a kick out of this next chapter in El’s story, even if a lot of the new series shine has worn off in this sequel.

*All quotes subject to change at publication.

I NEED MORE! The best authors are skilled torturers and Naomi Novik tortured, slayed, and put that candy cherry on top in this one. You liked El the first time around? Snarky, sarcastic, clever El is your favorite sour patch kid you can't help but savor. The way her mind just keeps moving at 100 miles/hour really brings out your own vicarious anxiety and you can't put down the book until the very last page, and STILL you can't scratch that itch quite yet! Orion and El have the best dynamic, a perfectly fumbling romance with quirkiness to the nth degree. Monsters, action, and powers exceed godly level; it's Dragon Ball Z, Survivor, and Star Wars/Hogwarts all in one. Without giving away spoilers, I can't really say much more except for THIS BOOK IS WORTH IT AND THEN SOME. This series surpasses all others I have read in the past 3 years and that's saying something from a hardcore book nerd.

I cannot thank (and curse because the next book is so far away from publication) NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group enough for this wicked opportunity to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Last Graduate immediately throws you back in to world of El. The reader gets romance, action, and comedy packed into a fantastic fantasy read. Each time I finish a Naomi Novik book I am left crying, wanting to hop into the next book. I will be anxiously awaiting the third book.