Thank you to NetGalley for sending me this eARC in exchange for an honest review.
DNFed at 50%.
This was a book that I was highly anticipating but it turned out to be a disappointment. The main issue that I had with this book was the world building. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I didn't understand the world, but that it felt like I was reading a text book about the world rather than a story based in it. Naomi Novik describes everything in the most minute detail and gives backstory and historical context to every single scene in the book. This means that the plot doesn't develop quickly enough as there is constant explanation of everything over and over again. I'm not even sure what the plot actually is. After 50% nothing had happened and I found it painful to read.
Overall, this was a book with a great concept and setting that was ruined by the excessive detail, meandering sentences and little focus on the plot. It felt like a battle to get to 50%.

This is a fun ya fantasy set in a sentient high school for magical children. The school provides students with what they need to learn as there are no teachers, no holidays and kids don't see their families again until they graduate. That's if they survive to graduate. The school is infested with maleficaria, malevolent beasts that will kill and eat the students if they don't find and destroy them with magic first, using either white power (mana) or dark power (malia).

Despite being very multicultural with students from all over the world, the students are divided into those who grew up in powerful magical enclaves and those who didn't. Galadriel (her mother was a LOTR fan), known as El is part Indian and part Welsh and is a snarky feminist who grew up with a single mother. She also has a dark prophecy hanging over her head which she is terrified to reveal. Unlike the enclave kids she doesn't have a host of friends watching her back and a source of shared power to call on when needed. She's a bit of a loner, not helped by her snarky attitude and rudeness. She's not even very nice to popular golden boy Oliver Lake who's mission in life is to save as many of his junior year class, including El's, as he can by killing maleficaria. However, she knows she will need to make some alliances or be invited into an enclave if she is to graduate and then survive on the outside.

I loved the world building and the system of magic in this book. Novik has created some very nasty beasties and nasty ways for students to die. There quite big sections of information dealt out in the book but they did help to explain the way the school and the magic worked and to set up for future books in the series where less explanation will be needed. I also loved all the characters in this book. Even the snarky, unpopular El who is smart and witty with a mile wide chip on her shoulder. The enclave kids were even likeable despite their sense of privilege and elitism. Oliver reminds me of a golden retriever puppy, always goodheartedly rushing in to help even though El does nothing to encourage him. However, as they will discover together they make a formidable pair and I look forward to them moving into their senior year together in the next book in the series.

A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik

Review from Jeannie Zelos book reviews

Genre: Sci-fi and Fantasy

I loved Naomi's Uprooted, and was so hoping this book would be along those lines. It sounded fun and exciting but....from the start I really disliked El, she's rude, arrogant, stand offish. When we know more about her I understood much of why she was that way, but I never really got to like her.
The school is just weird and I didn't understand why parents were so desperate to send kids there, given so many of them died. I'm not sure what they gained from being in all that constant danger that they couldn't have been taught in safety.
I just found it hard to connect, with the story or the participants and eventually gave up halfway through. A shame as I so loved Uprooted and was certain I'd enjoy this. Still, it won't put me off trying Naomi's next book.


Stars: Two, I guess Nick is an author who's writing others love but I don't. I found the story had no real point, drifted along and relied on stereotypes that irritated me. It could have been so much more for me, but as ever its perfect for others.

Arc via netgalley and publishers

El Higgins is in her penultimate year at the Scholomance, a school of magic like no other. There are no teachers, no holidays, friendships are purely strategic, and only half the students make it out alive. El is maybe one of the school’s most powerful students, but she possesses a dark power that could wipe out her fellow classmates if she used it. Determined to make it out alive but to also not become a malificer (a dark wizard), El’s only option is to make some strong alliances and get invited into an enclave where the wizards share power and protect each other. The only problem, she isn’t the best at making friends.

I loved this book SO. MUCH. El is possibly one of my favourite ever characters, and I also loved Orion and the others. El is an extremely likeable character, despite her affinity with destruction. She’s prickly and opinionated, and generally quite stand-offish, but it was incredibly easy to understand her way of thinking, and her dark magic is so damn cool.

The plot literally just follows El and her classmates through one year of school, with no larger outside story, so it isn’t a particularly detailed or complex plot. Yet, somehow, it wasn’t boring at all, and remained exciting, eventful and entertaining from start to finish.

But where this book really shines is in the world building. How a school with no teachers works is brilliantly explained, and the entire thing makes complete sense despite being magical fantasy and sounding more than a little bit farfetched. I cannot wait for book #2!

On paper, this sounded absolutely fantastic. It was one of my most anticipated releases for 2020, but it ended up being a huge disappointment.

Welcome to a School of Magic unlike any you have ever encountered. There are no teachers, no holidays, friendships are purely strategic, and the odds of survival are never equal. Once you're inside, there are only two ways out: you graduate or you die.

Sounds amazing, doesn't it?! Yet it sadly ended up being a bit of a mess with too much telling and not enough showing. I felt that the majority of this book was our main character giving a background on things that are happening in real-time. When she encounters a fantastical beast in the corridor, you don't get a big action-packed fight scene. No, you get a 3-page long account on the history of the beast. The volume of info-dumping was astronomical, and I think this partly explained why I was feeling bored a lot of the time. Just when I thought the plot was starting to shine and make sense, it would get super confusing with a lot of random information thrown in.

There were some glimpses of amazing world-building, and the story/premise holds a massive amount of potential, but this book was disappointing for me. I'm incredibly grateful that I was given the opportunity to read an ARC, and I hope that the story improves in the next book, but this missed the mark.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Life in the Scolomance is very deadly.  Students are there to try and master their art, and hone their magic.  There's no teachers, and no holidays.  Alliances are made rather than friendships.  Everyone is working towards one goal - getting out alive.  Alliances don't come easily for El, and so making it out alive is even harder.  What her peers don't realise is that she possess a power stronger than any of them, a power strong enough to wipe out millions.  The problem for El is that using this power to save herself might cost the lives of all the other students.

Naomi Novik has been on my radar as an author I wanted to read for a while now.  I'm very glad I was given a chance to read an arc for this one and actually be introduced to her writing finally.  I'll definitely be reading more of her books.

A Deadly Education was a book that grabbed me within the first few chapters, despite me not knowing entirely what was going on.  Before long I was really struggling to put it down. The world of The Scolomance is completely new, but it doesn't take long to get to grips with how it works.  Much as it's a pretty terrifying world, there's still a part of me that would want to visit (with Orion there to protect me anyway!).  The magic system is unlike anything I've read before, and is fascinating for it.  The whole thing is delightfully dark.

I really liked El as a character, even though she did seem a bit abrasive at the beginning.  I could totally understand where she was coming from, and her strength of character and insistence on standing up for what she felt was right was admirable.  Orion was great too,  albeit oblivious to a lot of what is going on around him.  The relationship between the two of them is hilarious to read about, and just the right amount of endearing that it doesn't make you go ugh.

Novik gives us a fantastically diverse cast here, with characters from literally all over the world and all backgrounds.  She also explores the themes of inequality and injustice incredibly thoroughly.  Having El question these behaviours is a great way of pushing a reader to wonder whether they would do the same.

The story had me hooked from early on. I wasn't entirely sure where we were going, but I was all in for the ride.  Now that I've finished this one I've got a feeling where the series is going and can't wait for the next one, even without the extra sequel hook at the end!

Thanks to NetGalley, Random House UK and Cornerstone for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Students across the world work toward graduation, but for the students at Scholomance, it’s a whole other level. Galadriel ‘El’ is sick of golden boy monster-slayer Orion Lake saving her life, when she doesn’t need saving from the monsters that lurk about the school. El is one of the most powerful people in the building - she could slay the monsters with a click of her fingers - but she can’t give in to the horror of her full potential power. Instead, she’s got to work hard and build her reserves. When Orion thinks El is up to no good, it sets into motion a precarious liaison that tests the fabric of peers and power groups and perhaps the very survival of their class group.

A Deadly Education is like a combination - Nevernight, Shadowhunters, Shadow & Bone, The Hunger Games.

A Deadly Education will be known as the comeback kid for the foreseeable future. There was a moment when I genuinely didn’t think I’d keep going, because it was so challenging. Hand on heart I’ll be so honest: I thought some fanfics I’ve read are better than this.

A Deadly Education is primarily a world building book through the perspective of El, who’s rich narration also feels like a character study. There is no major plot event(s) other than toward the end of the book, which is appreciated by the earlier time spent establishing ADE’s supernatural world.

I really, really liked El. She’s the textbook definition of sarcastic and angry. She took me back to all those days when I was a teenager angry with the world, people, just everything and blared my music to drown it all out. She reads as if she’s got a chip on her shoulder and I loved it because I got it. El feels as if the whole world is against her - who hasn’t felt that feeling, right? - but the difference is it most definitely is in El’s case.

One of the best things about A Deadly Education was the relationship of Orion and El. Their interactions are predominantly banter fuelled to the point I was genuinely laughing, so that carries and compensates for the all of book’s weaker points.

I felt the book lacked an overarching plot that pulls everything together - at least an obvious and immediate overarching plot. We’re repeatedly reminded of El’s needs for successful graduation (which is not happening in this book)... So instead we’re focused on El explaining all the different ways to have a successful graduation. That’s what made up the bulk of the read imo. And as much as I loved all of that, it’s undeniable the book had a flat atmosphere to it. It’s as if it was missing a soul and life force. At the worst of times it felt like a deflated soufflé and I considered DNFing it around the 30 - 40% region. It also didn’t help that Novik used “et cetera” mid explanation a handful of times, which felt careless and read as if she herself were bored, especially concerning when whats being explained is the book’s own magic system, opposed to some everyday mundane thing there’s a chance readers may know.

But I enjoyed the school’s set-up and the monsters aka ‘mals’ - there was a whole monster hunting predator vibe going on throughout the read which was sinister but thrilling. I found reading about El’s studies really catered to me as a student at uni, and was often intrigued about what El was going to have to do next in order to not anger the school.

The ending of this book! Oh my gossssh. My gut twisted and my eyes bugged out of my head. There’s so many questions and a big desire to know what the heck is going on?! I need the next one now!

A Deadly Education wasn’t what I was expecting, for better and for worse. I wish there’d been a central plot (or stronger plot) alongside the world building and El’s character, but I did enjoy both of these when they weren’t so empty in feeling. I can’t wait for the sequel!

After reading and loving Spinning Silver i was really looking forward to reading this however it didn't live up to the expectations that i had. I thought that a fantasy book set around a magic school would be perfect for me but a lot of the time i found it to be info dumpy and quite boring. I did like the book dont get me wrong but it took me a while to get through as i lost focus quite easily. This was mainly due to the fact that we would be halfway through something and then it would cut to a backstory. The last 15-20% of the book was the best part as it where the majority of the action happened and the ending definitely set it up for the sequel. But the last part of the book was also the only part that seemed to have a plot line, the rest of the book was just following Galadriels everyday life.

Galadriel, or El to her friends (if she had any) is half Welsh, half Indian, and is bursting with surly attitude and sarcasm. I loved her independence and her strength of character. She is a student at the Scholomance, which is a magical boarding school that is set in a void. There are no teachers, no adults and plenty of nasty beasties that want to devour the students. It's a fight for survival, for acceptance and an opportunity to strive for a better future.
Roll on the next book in this series, I'm eager to learn more.

Making it through high school can feel like hell sometimes - and that’s especially true for students of the Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted, where monsters lurk around every corner and only the best and brightest survive graduation.

Naomi Novik isn’t a new name to fantasy fans, but this is a whole new look for her. A Deadly Education feels grittier and much more down-to-earth than Novik’s usual epic fantasy storylines. Reviewers will make the inevitable comparisons to Harry Potter, but the Scholomance is a far cry from Hogwarts. In the world Novik has created teenage sorcerers are monsters’ favourite meals and the school is overrun with them. Surviving means being constantly on guard, staying up all night, never walking to class alone and potentially duelling your dinner.

El, the protagonist, is a witch of considerable power. Unfortunately, her speciality is dark magic, which she avoids using. All she wants is to be left alone to make her own preparations for graduation - but school superhero Orion insists on saving her life every five minutes, much to her annoyance.

El and Orion were the highlight of A Deadly Education for me - they hit so many relationship tropes I’m a sucker for (unknowingly dating, pessimist/optimist, finding each other endearingly annoying). I’m really looking forward to seeing how their relationship develops in book two.

If I have one criticism of A Deadly Education, it’s that El’s inner monologue veered off into exposition territory a little too often for my liking. The exposition in the first chapter felt particularly forced. It slowed down the narrative and wasn’t even strictly necessary, since the reader could have learnt about the school and the history of El’s world as the story unfolded. Still, El herself was a great narrator - snarky and jaded, and yet still so endearing.

All in all, a strong start to a series I’ll definitely be continuing with! Many thanks to Random House UK for providing a copy of A Deadly Education. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

A deadly education review

Do you want to be a mighty wizard?
Do you want to join a group of like minded sociopathic individuals to get on and join the elite of the wizarding world? Then:

Welcome to A Deadly Education!
(Or how to win friends and influence people, so that the nasty things don't eat you)

Right, let's get the obvious out of the way. This is a magic school for witches and wizards and this is not the sole property of he who shall not be named. Okay? Phew, glad we got that sorted.

What we have here is a tale of friendship against adversity. The old romantic mismatch. A kind of Harry met Sally situation in which the good guy is annoyingly good and the damsel is constantly distressed at being regularly rescued by the good guy, even though she is some mega evil witch that has a prophecy attached to her (whoa, stop it! We got those comparisons out of the way in the first sentence. Didn't you know that in quite a lot fantasy stories, there's a chosen one with a prophecy attached? Well, don't you? Jeez anyone would think that this is a HP reference. Well it's not! Okay?).

Glad we got that out of the way!

The story revolves around Galadriel (or El for short) who is a pupil at the Scholomance, a school for witches and wizards whose first lesson that they have to learn, is to get safely through breakfast before they become breakfast. The Scholomance is a magic school that is populated by magical teens that have been whisked away from their parents and have to board in a school that has a vast array of different ways to kill you in some horrible way. From flesh eating maggots in the porridge to demonic corridors that will strip the skin from your bones, there is an endless way to get yourself killed. Add to that psychopathic students who will happily kill you for no apparent reason, this makes my days at school seem positively balmy in comparison.

On top of that, you have to have political skills that are reminiscent of a medieval court. Where you have to form alliances or trade something of worth in order to fix your door, brush your teeth or even get a shower This place is tough beyond belief and our hero, El is always letting us know how dangerous, how tough and how many different ways to kill you there are. On every page. Okay, okay we get it.

This school is flippin dangerous!

And that is one of the intrinsic problems that I found with the book. It constantly tells you that this place is dangerous, and it also constantly tells you that El is so powerful that she could easily (and happily) destroy everyone who looks at her the wrong way.

Surprisingly, El does not have many friends. However, this changes when the handsomely, charming popular kid, Orion Lake, starts to take an interest in her and forces his friendship on her, whether she likes it or not. However, as the story progresses we see that even though they are at the opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, they both share similar experiences and are both equally isolated.

In a Deadly Education, Novak's wizarding school is not all jolly hockey sticks and full of quaint little traditions that hark back to a corner of England that is stuck in the innocence of yesteryears. It's filled with scary monsters and super creeps. It is the dog eat dog world of a capitalist society where the more power and influence you have, the more likely it is that you will survive. It juxtaposes the world outside, which again is not filled with a lovely, cutesy world that resides in the past. In Novak's world, being a wizard is a dangerous lifestyle which attracts the monsters that live under your bed so that they can kill you and eat you.

Once you get past the myriad ways in which you can die, be eaten or be killed and then eaten, you get to the heart of the story. Which is, survive. Simple as that. Everything is geared towards surviving the experience of school and hopefully get out of there. That is if you can get past a cornacopia of nightmarish beasts at the graduation ceremony that are hell bent on doing all the things mentioned earlier.

Why anyone would want to be a wizard in A Deadly Education is beyond me. I would use the same tactics that the mundanes (the non - magical community) use. Don't believe in magic. Simple as that. The mundanes do not believe in it and that saves them from the monsters. Otherwise, it looks like you are in for a life of looking over your shoulder and elevating yourself to the rank of paranoid sociopath.

On the whole, I enjoyed A Deadly Education and the story of the snarky main character and how she manages to get through everyday and how her world expands from a world of one to her development of 'friends'. However, at times the story is a little slow. It's just that it feels like this is a setup, it sets up the world, the characters and is just the start of the story. Will I be reading the next one? I think I will, I wouldn't mind seeing what happens to El and the gang.

This is the story of Galadriel, known as El. She is a student at the Scholomance, a wizarding school that is as far from Hogwarts as it is possible to get. The school is populated by students all looking to make alliances so that they have a better chance of getting out of the school alive, for the students graduate as seniors through a mal infested hall that means chances of survival are small. With no teachers to protect the students it's all about who has the power to help keep you alive and what you can for them in return. El has her life saved by Orion on several occasions but it is unclear what he wants from her in return.

Being honest I'd like to give this 3.5 stars but they don't allow half stars and it doesn't warrant going up to 4. The problems I had with this book is that too much time is spent setting a scene or describing an element of history for the school or mal that is being tackled. This is to the detriment of the story as it breaks up the action far too much and isn't even a short explanation but always really long winded and goes on for pages - by the time we return to the action you have forgotten what was happening. This is particularly noticeable in a scene where El takes on a Mawmouth - a vicious multi eyed, multi mouthed creature that only one person has successfully killed without dying themselves. Even as El walks towards the creature we are taken on a history of the Mawmouth, where it came from, how it has been tackled in the past, how many people have been killed by them including El's own father, how there are two big Mawmouths at the Scholomance etc etc etc. By the time we get back to El pages have passed. I understand the need to let the reader know this is an incredible thing she is tackling but we didn't need Voldemort's life history in the first book to know that he was a evil and difficult to challenge.

Having said all of this, the last 15% of the book is really good and when I finished I found myself hoping there will be more books in the series. Aimed at young adults, I found some of the language a bit too colourful for teens.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Welcome to the Scholomance where you either graduate, or die. The school is self-contained, there are no teachers or support staff, the school provides your classes, homework and food. All you have to do is avoid the creatures trying to eat you for your power, whether it's going to class or getting your meals.

Galadriel, or El, is our heroine, brave, independent, but also vulnerable, smart and sarcastic. She has spent most of her time at school alone, but she needs to find students to collaborate with if she is going to survive. The problem is the other students think she is evil, when the reality is more surprising.

An all-action story, with great dialogue, characters you genuinely like who find themselves in some truly terrifying life-threatening situations. Looking forward to El's final year.

"by the end of the day Orion was the only person in the school who didn't know we were now unquestionably an item."

This book succeeds in being dark, atmospheric, exciting and amusing all at the same time. I expected it to be similar to Hogwarts, but it was completely different and I loved it.

Galadriel is a junior at the Scholomance, a school for magical teenagers from around the world. However, there are no professors, no adults and the building is filled with hundreds of mals which want nothing more than to kill all the students. The only hope for surviving to graduation is by making alliances, something which is easier said than done for our resident outcast, El. Cold, rude and with an affinity for destruction, no one wants to risk their own chances by befriending her.

El is my new favourite MC. Strong, defensive and sarcastic. I loved her abruptness with the enclave kids and how she repeatedly stood up for herself. The blossoming friendship between her, Aadhya and Liu was incredibly heart-warming and I am definitely rooting for these three to graduate. Orion's character was completely unexpected. I was so used to YA heroes being cocky and overconfident, but Orion was a sweetheart and every time he blushed, my heart melted. The romance is a slow-burn but I can't wait to see what happens next.

The worldbuilding was phenomenal. The mals were all terrifying and I loved the how atmospheric the scholomance was. The rules regarding magic and the Void were all unique and I never knew what was going to happen in the next chapter. The first chapters are filled with a lot of information, but it is all required to understand the rest of the story. This meant it was a little slow to start, but once it did, the pacing never slowed. My slight nuance was that the year groups were called freshmen, sophomore etc, despite the fact that the school was in Wales and set up by the London enclave.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love books about magic, and this one does not disappoint.

Set in a school of magic, but unlike any in any other story (I was a little worried in the opening few pages that this was going to be Harry Potter-ish, but it really isn't).

All the students must work under their own steam and look to make alliances between themselves in order to survive the monstrous terrors of graduation.

El is a student who comes with no other allegiances, no enclave on the outside to support her, and must create and harvest her own power. However, soon she finds she is drawn into connections with other students and her immense powers are gradually revealed.

A wealth of powerful characters, some great monsters, and a thrilling atmosphere throughout - a great read.

I love Naomi Novik's folklore-inspired fantasy novels. One of my all-time favourite books is Spinning Silver, which is a re-imagining of Rumpelstiltskin so I was thrilled to get my hands on an early copy of A Deadly Education. It wasn't quite what I was expecting but I really enjoyed it. Imagine a kind of Harry Potter where everything is out to get you, not just the bad guy!

El (short for Galadriel) has been born into a magical family and is now studying at the Scholomance - a school for magic that (unlike Hogwarts) seems to actively want to kill its students. All El wants to do is learn magic and survive the first year - without the help of popular rich boy Orion. Oh yes, and there's a prophecy that says one day El will bring death and destruction to all the magical enclaves in the world...

Naomi Novik has created an amazing, original and incredibly detailed world. Sometimes it's best to just go with the flow rather than try to understand everything. The story is fast-paced (with near-death experiences in practically every chapter) and completely thrilling. I truly had no idea what was going to happen next. Part of the fun is to see El slowly forced to make friends - she is so used to people assuming she's into dark magic, she has always kept her distance from everyone and prefers to work out things on her own. Her relationship with Orion (who is determined to save everyone, whether they want it or not) is also sweet and funny.

A Deadly Education is a school-of-magic story with a slightly darker edge that Naomi Novik's regular readers will love. It should also appeal to fans of authors such as Soman Chainani (The School for Good and Evil). I loved El and Orion, and was completely swept away by the novel's originality and exuberance. I can't wait for the next one!


Thank you to Naomi Novik and Del Ray/Cornerstone for my copy of this book, which I requested via NetGalley and reviewed voluntarily.

A Deadly Education will be released on 29th September 2020

I’m posting this review at 25%
I have been really enjoying this book but am finding it really difficult to read the ebook version. I think there is so much going on with the different characters and creatures etc that I need a physical copy to flip back for clirifcation if I need to. Saying that, it is very enjoyable and engaging. Will definitely be picking up a physical copy when it is released!
For the portion I have read it’s a five star read

At the Scholomance students are supposed to be safe, but the monsters the school was supposed to protect them from have invaded. Now, half the class is slated for death before graduation.

I started this book expected a more Harry Potteresque magic school, with the caveat of a serious chance of death. I wasn’t disappointed when the school turned out to be more of a dungeon, a half building, half mechanism which has extremely decayed.

We follow El, probably the most powerful Malia, the life force of other living things, user the world has ever seen. However she refuses to use this as she was raised by a pacifist. El has a chip on her shoulder, after always being shunned by the everyone except her mother. Slowly she opens up to Orion and Aadhya. Orion is the most popular boy in the school. Aadhya is someone who chooses not to shun anyone based on a feeling they give off.

This book gripped me immediately, and I was unable to put it down despite extreme tiredness. El, while she is stuck in her ways, is an interesting character when she discovers the world is not out to get her. This book is a great replacement for any Harry Potter fan who has an interest in dystopia.

I’m going to start by saying that I had really high expectations for ‘A Deadly Education’, as I’ve adored the previous books I have read by Novik (Spinning Silver and Uprooted) and it definitely didn’t disappoint! I loved every minute of this book and am already itching for the second one. Having seen a lot of Harry Potter caparisons, I would say if that’s what you’re expecting, look elsewhere. The Scholomance is dark and dangerous, and the protagonist El is a lot more bitter, sarcastic and isn’t trying to be a hero. There’s a prophecy and a magic school, but that’s where it ends in my opinion!

‘A Deadly Education’ starts slowly, and requires you to pay attention, though that wasn’t an issue as I was drawn in from the first sentence. The worldbuilding was wonderful, and I was gripped by it, always wanting to learn the next new thing. I was so interested in both the Scholomance and also the ‘real’ world, the magic system and monsters. I don’t want to say too much, so that you can enjoy everything for the first time yourself, but I liked that the mals (monsters) are all disgusting and creepy, the mana system of magic and the workarounds for it’s abuse aren’t unique as such, but they are refreshing considering the amount of ‘innate magical power with no limits’ stuff I’ve read lately! There’s a lot of unsettling ideas in this book, and I love things being a little twisted and creepy, which at times this book definitely is. Saying that, there are a lot of moments where I laughed out loud, and there is a lot of wit, banter and humour mixed in with the shudder inducing mals.

Now onto the characters. Galadriel, better known as El, is brilliant, and I adored her. She’s kind of spiky, constantly on edge and full of anger and frustration. She’s a bit morally grey, which is my favourite kind of character. She could so easily turn to the dark side, but keeps trying to be a good person despite the effort that requires – and when your school keeps trying to kill you and is pushing you to be evil, that requires a lot of hard work. I liked her immediately but she may not be for everyone, and possibly requires a bit of warming up to. I’m a total sucker for a grumpy magic user though! I enjoyed watching her navigate relationships with other students, considering how much she’s an outcast. She’s always scheming (which is honestly necessary) which was interesting. She’s powerful, but not in a way she can be useful without blowing everything up. She was honestly so much fun to follow, and her snippy, sarcastic wit was an absolute joy. Next we have Orion, the golden boy of the Scholomance. He goes around saving other students (including El) and has a lot of fans, followers and general hangers-on. He’s too nice for his own good, a bit oblivious, exasperating and also loveable. I really enjoyed his character development, and all of his interations with El. He’s a lot more interesting than he appears at first, and I really enjoyed watching both he and El grow. There are a lot of excellent relationships to be found within the pages of this book, despite initial appearances, and I enjoyed that they all felt nuanced and realistic.

I really feel like I can’t say much more without spoiling anything but this book was absolutely brilliant, and I highly recommend it to fans of Novik’s other works, grumpy wizards, interesting magic systems, creepy monsters, magic schools, brilliant characters, excellent world building and fantastic writing. I’m counting down the days until book two already, I can’t wait to be back in the halls of the Scholomance and it’s definitely one of my top books of the year!

Content warnings: Violence including murder, injuries, gore, many gross ways to die, and minor character death (none of this terribly graphic); black magic including using life force of others mentioned; suicide mentioned in the abstract; parental death mentioned.

I should start with a disclaimer: I really don’t think this book is going to be for everyone. It’s a weird beast, somehow simultaneously slow and fast. It’s full of hugely detailed discussion of its own worldbuilding, and if you don’t immediately click with the main character, it’s probably not going to be your cup of tea. That being said, I adored every single second of it, so if you have similar taste to me, you’re going to be on cloud nine! I’d compare it to early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – teen snark meets horrifying monsters via a little light romance – or possibly if someone handed black magic to all the characters of Heathers. Picture a school whose corners are full of monsters ready to eat up tasty little magical kids – no teachers in sight, of course, so classes are self-taught and survival of the fittest is in full swing. Amongst the Scholomance’s students is El, an extremely jaded young woman who just wants to survive to graduation without succumbing to her innate talent for evil, and who is plagued by the unwanted help of Orion, an adorkable cinnamon roll prone to heroics and not at all prone to noticing when someone really doesn’t want to be his friend. When your own school is trying to eat you, and some privileged wannabe hero won’t stop saving your life, things can’t get much worse, right? Wrong.

I adored El. She’s a fascinating set of contradictions that makes her feel really unique – she has a true affinity for city-levelling, world-dominating evil, but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it. When the school offers her a new spell to learn, it’s usually lethal even if she asked for the most innocuous charm, but rather than diving headfirst into the darkest of magic and using her power to rule the school, she tries to keep herself on the straight and narrow. She’s so guarded that the other students find her intensely unlikeable – but I found her combination of self-awareness, smarts, and black humour completely winning. She starts off as someone who, rejected by her peers, has decided to reject them right back, and as someone who spent most of school using that as a coping mechanism, I connected with her instantly. Her voice is just so vivid and engaging – though she tries to pretend she doesn’t care about anything, she’s so interested in so many things that she drags you with her into long explanations that provide a huge amount of information about the magical world. I loved her so much, and it was definitely her voice that sucked me into the book so hard.

I can see people being turned off by the incessant flow of information that El provides, and I’ve read several reviews deriding this as infodumps, but for me, it was exactly what I’ve been longing for in a book since I was a kid. Here is a magical world hidden next to ours, and the main character is as interested in how it works as I am! She never stops feeding us tidbits of worldbuilding, and I found the whole thing enthralling. Yes, give me all the three-page digressions about the history of a particular grimoire or a painstakingly accurate description of how the language classes work – this is the stuff I live for. You get a real sense that though the world is completely everyday for El and her peers, she’s spent plenty of time considering how it works. There’s a great balance between these deep dives into things, and moments where she’ll say offhandedly ‘a yarnbogle skittered around the corner’ or something and you won’t even bat an eyelid even though a yarnbogle’s never been described before, you’re just like ‘yup, sounds about right’. The worldbuilding is so good that you start to feel like you just know what’s normal. I literally went to the bathroom last night and had a short panic that I hadn’t checked for any monsters. It’s that immersive.

There is so much of this book that I can’t talk about without giving huge spoilers, and I really think it’s one you should go into fairly cold so that you can get the full effect, so the next few sentences are going to be intentionally vague. I adored El’s character development – it’s far from a simple progression. I loved heroic idiot Orion Lake and his weird growing friendship with the school’s resident loser. I loved the wide array of students from all over the globe, and the way the classes ran to accommodate the many different languages needed, let alone the huge variety of skills and spells needed – I really got the sense that every student would have a wholly different experience according to their needs and affinities. I loved the ingenuity of all the different kinds of monsters, and, speaking as someone who usually hates action scenes, I loved all the monster fights! Basically, I loved this book from the first line to the last – and oh my god, what a last line it was.

I said on Twitter that if you’re someone like me who was always frustrated that Harry Potter never went to his damn classes or told us what he was learning, then A Deadly Education will scratch that itch so well it’ll be like it never existed. I just want to see behind the scenes of every magical school, and A Deadly Education offers the perfect kind of immersive, all-encompassing setting for me! If you are someone who dislikes description, this may not work for you (though there is plenty of action too!), but for me, this was a book I could luxuriate in, soaking up every detail.

Look, this was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in as long as I can remember. It managed to do something I didn’t even know I was waiting for, and give me a painstakingly well-described world to get lost in the detail of, a main character I could identify with incredibly strongly, and a story that snuck up while I was looking at those two things, grabbed me in its teeth, and refused to let go. I was grinning throughout. I will be astonished if this isn’t my best book of the year – it’s made me want to retroactively knock a star off everything else I’ve read so far. Simply stunning. Not even ten out of five – ELEVEN.