A Deadly Education

304 pages

English language

Published Feb. 26, 2020 by TBS/GBS/Transworld.

ISBN:
978-1-5291-0085-3
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4 stars (8 reviews)

“With flawless mastery, Naomi Novik creates a school bursting with magic like you’ve never seen before, and a heroine for the ages—a character so sharply realized and so richly nuanced that she will live on in hearts and minds for generations to come.”

3 editions

Slow burn

4 stars

This book was such a slow burn for me. Coming highly praised, I came in here expecting a traditional school of wizardry tale. But your HP it is not. It's good though, very good.

Told from first person perspective, our narrator is Galadriel, a sophomore at the Scholomance, a deadly place of education indeed. The students learn magic simply by surviving the many horrors the school throws at them. There are no houses or anything the like, but alliances to make sure you survive your senior year. Students have to fight their way out, through masses of monsters.

Galadriel is a loner though. Secretly, she's one of the most powerful magic-users of the school, but she can only use spells of destruction. As the story progresses, Galadriel has to make alliances herself, and figure out if she and the most prolific monster killer of Scholomance, Orion Lake, are dating or …

Review of 'A Deadly Education' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Anissa Dadia does an excellent job as narrator keeping you interested in a book that starts out featuring an angsty teenage dark mage who is in a terrible place by force. Naomi Novik deserves credit for setting up such a difficult task as an author. But as things progress, and the book wins the reader over, we get to see Novik’s ability to subtly include allegory on a number of real world social ills. That and some very nice language work… plus a very good ending making me get the second volume right away. 4.5 stars rounded up!

Fun all the way through

4 stars

A lot of reviewers complained reasonably that the worldbuilding is pretty unbelievable at times, but I was having too much fun to notice.

I loved the big gimmick underlying the whole book: the protagonist has the talents and affinities to be the most powerful and destructive necromancer of her generation - there’s even prophecies about her! - but she was raised by pacifist hippies and works incredibly hard not to accidentally incinerate or mind-control her classmates, building power not by sacrificing animals but through push-ups and crochet.

It was ok I guess?

3 stars

I've read Uprooted and Spinning Silver and liked those a lot, but this book really clanged for me. I almost gave up on it a few times, but persisted through to the end and found it to be mostly okay. It's a pretty interesting concept for a book (I didn't realize until I was finished that the Scholomance is from folklore) and I could imagine the next book being ok, but I can also imagine that I might not bother reading it.