A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, Book 1)

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, Book 1)
Naomi Novik, 2020

Premise: El attends a school for magic-users. Only the school is probably trying to kill them, and it'll take more than dedication to learning to survive.

Despite having enjoyed many of Novik's other books, I avoided this one for a few years. Anything where the opening pitch is "school of sorcerers" is getting some serious side-eye from me, and I figured it was YA-ish, and I find YA tedious or disappointing 90% of the time. 

In this case, I ran across some more info about the protagonist on Tumblr that piqued my interest. El's name is really Galadriel because her mom is a hippie witch. She has a talent for dark and deadly magic so strong that it basically amounts to a curse. (As in, it's very difficult for her to, say, cast a spell to help a flower grow, but she would find it incredibly easy to poison an entire countryside.) She's trying to keep both these facts (her mom and her power) from becoming common knowledge, while she tries to survive an extremely dangerous situation. 

There's a lot of high school in here, but in a way that I actually enjoyed. The stakes of the situation mean that cliques are literally a matter of life and death, and gossip wielded smartly can protect someone or cause them to be cast out. All the kids know that this is a time for building alliances and impressing people who can both help you survive and maybe give you a job after graduation.

I really liked El, prickly and angry and cranky as she is, and I didn't completely hate the obvious romance plot because it took a long time to warm up. I thought the world was really interesting and nicely complex. But mostly it was El, struggling and rageful and trying to do the right thing even against her own best interests, that kept me going. 

There have been some reviews of this book calling out racial insensitivity. One section was apparently revised, so it probably wasn't in the copy I read. The remaining points I'm not sure I agree with (for example, students tend to specialize in spells of a particular language or two, so categorizing groups of students by what language they speak would be logically similar to talking about the science nerds or the jocks) but I understand why certain aspects of the setting rub people the wrong way. I liked the casual way students from around the world all have to coexist in this school. So your mileage may vary. 

Overall I enjoyed this book more than I expected to and I'll probably read the sequel. 

4 Stars - A Very Good Book