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A Deadly Education by Naomi NovikThe Scholomance #1
Published by Del Rey on September 29, 2020
Age Group & Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: biracial protagonist (half-Welsh, half-Indian), Chinese side character, Indian American side character
Format: eBook
Source: Library
The first book of the Scholomance trilogy is the story of an unwilling dark sorceress who is destined to rewrite the rules of magic.
I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life.
Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I’m not joining his pack of adoring fans.
I don’t need help surviving the Scholomance, even if they do. Forget the hordes of monsters and cursed artifacts, I’m probably the most dangerous thing in the place. Just give me a chance and I’ll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world.
At least, that’s what the world expects. Most of the other students in here would be delighted if Orion killed me like one more evil thing that’s crawled out of the drains. Sometimes I think they want me to turn into the evil witch they assume I am. The school certainly does.
But the Scholomance isn’t getting what it wants from me. And neither is Orion Lake. I may not be anyone’s idea of the shining hero, but I’m going to make it out of this place alive, and I’m not going to slaughter thousands to do it, either.
Although I’m giving serious consideration to just one.
Trigger & Content Warnings: assault (graphic), attempted murder, death, violence
For all its flaws, A Deadly Education was intriguing, brilliant, and overall a blast to read… once you actually get into the story.
And it was very hard to get into the story. The first in Naomi Novik’s The Scholomance trilogy is so intricately crafted in its world-building that my brain practically exploded with the amount of information presented throughout the novel. It’s very textbook and lecture style that sometimes I feel like while in some books the romance overshadows the plot, it feels like the world-building overshadows the entire novel instead in this one. I truly hated myself reading it (because I’m not one for textbook styles), and I checked out so often at the beginning that I’m surprised I walked away with a relatively solid grasp of the world Novik builds, but alas, it hasn’t been too long since I was last in a school setting.
Except this school setting is much more deadly: the Scholomance is essentially where anyone magically gifted will be whisked off to at 14-years-old and for the next four years until they graduate, they’re in for the fight of their lives. Anything and everything might lead to their end, including the very food they eat and the bed they sleep in. I’d likely die the first night, and as morbid as it sounds, the sheer deadliness of the school drew me to read A Deadly Education in the first place. You just can’t trust anyone or anything in there, but not going to school is a worse option because then you’re just a tasty magical snack for the maleficaria.
Galadriel, or El, is currently a third-year at the Scholomance who is antisocial and prefers to keep it that way. There are few people she lets in her circle, though if she had the choice, she’d probably go at it alone (and she does… mostly) because of her power. She knows full well she can destroy the school and the people within it, if she only just gives in to the temptation and lets go of her self-control. After all, she’s prophecized to go to the dark side and has an affinity with death/destroying things.
Being in El’s head was both painful and not so painful, because while some people might love her narration, I actually hated it, at least at the very beginning. The narration is very stream of consciousness (which I hate), and not only that, but the textbook style makes it feel like she’s lecturing and looking at the world from a bit of a clinical lens and sometimes dismissive of the world around her. You could say she’s in her own bubble of sorts.
But she can also be terribly relatable, made some of the creative of choices that I don’t think I would’ve come up with at all, and came up with some of the best insults like “blob of unsteamed pudding.” She’s witty, grumpy, and underestimated by those around her, and added to the way she views the world and processes her thoughts? It made her a fascinating and entertaining character overall that is well-developed and has a lot of depth. As much as I hated the narration, the depth of her character is well worth looking over her constant rambling. Personally, I’m interested in seeing how she develops as a character in the next two books.
Important Note Regarding Criticisms
I’m aware of the criticisms regarding her biracial identity (among others), although I don’t quite agree with this one entirely: El is half-Welsh and half-Indian, but because of her upbringing and being out of touch with the Indian side of her family, she feels like a white character with brown skin. As someone who is Chinese-Vietnamese American, I sometimes feel like I’m out of touch with my Vietnamese side because I grew up primarily surrounded by Chinese culture, so I don’t have a Vietnamese name and don’t speak/read/write/understand it (I also don’t keep in contact with them either). And even then, I sometimes feel like I don’t “truly belong” with one culture or another, because while I do understand and speak Chinese, I can’t read or write them beyond the most basic of characters.
Saying this is racist unfortunately invalidates those experiences who are like El’s (including mine), although I will agree that it is a valid point that Novik could’ve made those choices as a white author to score easy diversity points without having to do any research. That said, I also felt Novik wasn’t making racial commentary (I would hope not, because white authors who do this is walking into a losing battle) but is instead examining wealth and privilege in the world of Scholomance and the different enclaves through El’s commentary, which I thought was well-explored, and I’m curious how Novik handles this aspect in the rest of the trilogy.
TLDR there’s a lot to unpack from that (and I could go on), but with all that said, I encourage reading other reviews like the one from A Naga of the Nusantara and Asma’s prior to reading A Deadly Education, as both reviewers address other criticisms as well. I personally won’t get into my views any further outside of the overall fact that things in the book could’ve been handled differently and better, but I will acknowledge this comes from a Western lens given that I was born and raised in the US so not only do I have privileges but I also have my own biases and blind spots.
I enjoyed El’s relationship dynamics with other characters as well, like with Liu and Aadhya that started out as a strategic alliance that slowly grew into a blossoming friendship over the course of the novel. And then there’s also Orion, who with her tendency to lie low and have restraint instead of fulling crossing over to the dark side, puts them in a frequent cross-paths of him stepping in and being a constant hero. Orion sometimes amused me with his heroic actions, though, because even if he’s a privileged boy who is clueless and tries to be the hero even when it’s a terrible time to be a hero, you kind of just want to adopt him under your wing while also knocking some sense into whatever brain cells he has left. Like a lot of aspects of the book, I’m excited to see how El’s relationship with all of them develops further in the rest of the trilogy (assuming they survive).
All things aside, A Deadly Education was overall deadly brilliant, full of humor and wit, but it’s also not for everyone, especially if you hate (or can overlook) stream-of-consciousness writing styles added on top of a lot intricate world details that really could’ve done with some cutting and still be perfectly fine. With the ending of the novel, I’m invested in finding out what happens next to El, especially whether she and the others make it out alive or not.
Sophia started blogging in February 2012 for the hell of it and is surprisingly still around. She has a GIF for nearly everything, probably listens to too much K-Pop and is generally in an existential crisis of sorts (she's trying her best). More of her bookish reviews and K-Pop Roundups can be found at The Arts STL.
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