4.5 stars

Ooooooh my god



What struck me the most was El as a character. Fierce, bold, snarky, sassy, stubborn, an absolute kick-ass eye-rolling heroine in every sense of the word. Her conflict? Not really wanting to be a heroine. I didn't feel as though the MC was a figment of the authors imagination, El felt as real a person to me as you and I. And that is what kept me hooked.

The truth is, I haven't actually read Deadly Scholomance, through no other reason than I simply cannot afford it right now and I have to spend my time collecting ARCs or ebooks wherever I can. So although it is on my list, I went into The Last Graduate completely blind. I've done this with plenty of series and found that this strategy works better in some series than others. The Last Graduate is one of those series where it didn't work as well, simply because the world building was so massive and terminology so original that I struggled to understand what things were at times. I never let this affect my review though as I know it is kinda self-inflicted. But due to this, I will recommend to everyone to read Deadly Scholomance first. And then to most definitely pick up The Last Graduate and read it.

If the sound of a wizard hell-bent on killing its students whilst the MC is a super powerful dark sorceress who solves dilemmas whilst being as mean and sarcastic as possible appeals to you, then this will be one for your TBR.

This is a very difficult one to write because I absolutely adored A Deadly Education but something about The Last Graduate just didn't do it for me. I wasn't so invested in the characters anymore and I just feel like something was missing. The frustration of El and Orion drove me to the brink and eventually I gave up caring, which is not what I was expecting for a love story I was invested in so much in the first book of the duology. Naomi Novik is a fantastic author and there is no debate on how much work went into the Scholomance story but I just didn't feel invested in this one. It felt more of a chore to read it rather than a joy and that's a whole new feeling for me when it comes to a Novik read! Maybe I need to re-read it down the line and I may feel differently as books are always open to the emotions of the reader at the time so I'm not ruling this one out to be epic later on.

Thank you to Del Rey and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Oh. My. God.
I'm always scared when it comes to the second book in a series, especially when I love the first book but this book did not disappoint. I didn't realise how much I missed being in this world with these characters.

This book picks up where the first book ends and honestly it felt like I had never been away and I easily slipped back in and found myself eagerly turning the pages. I was always a fan of El as a main character and I loved watching as her character developed even more in this book! I also loved seeing how her relationship with Orion grew and I liked seeing a different side of Orion.

I had no idea what direction Naomi Novik was going to take this book in and honestly I did not expect that ending. The fact that I now have to wait for the next book is already driving me insane. I need it now!

Honestly, I recommend this series to everyone, especially if you love fantasy and dark academia with a sarcastic and angry main character.

Welcome back to the Scholomance, the school that makes Hogwarts look like day care and the most brutal prison seem palatable in comparison. Four years without real daylight, proper food, or any supplies you didn’t bring with you at the start. Sure, there are no teachers, but the classes might just try to kill you and if they don’t, your classmates probably will.

Usual warning: just mentioning characters who appear in book 2 could be considered spoilers for the previous volume, so venture forth at your own peril.

Book 1, A Deadly Education, introduced us to El, a third year and loner who just happens to also be capable of spells that would destroy the world – if she wanted to, which thankfully she doesn’t. Usually. After the events of the first instalment, however, her powers are no longer quite the secret that they were – and it seems that even the school itself has decided to take notice and, y’know, maybe just try to kill her off.

It’s so, so difficult to have characters with enormous power – how do you introduce peril and tension, if the lead is capable of levelling cities? So while at first I had a few doubts about this continuation of the story, now that El is all ‘potential Dark Sorceress Supreme’, I was thoroughly impressed with the way the author handles it all. In fact, rather than a possible downside, the way this turns all that huge power into yet more obstacles is just – well, ‘chef’s kiss’, as the youth say 😉

The Last Graduate takes an already great story and situation, fantastic world building, and uses it all against itself to create a wholly new layer of story. I’m so used to second books just picking up where things left off and maybe reworking things a bit, I cannot tell you how much better than that this is – it’s just… SO MUCH BETTER! The story just grows so organically, a bit unexpectedly, and wow, yes please!

We’d left El on something of a minor cliffhanger in book 1, so I was delighted to be able to dive straight into the sequel – but paid for my smugness with an even bigger cliffhanger at the end of this one, so be warned. We’ll all have to wait until next year for the finale – but to be honest, I’m delighted for the excuse to reread the first two ahead of it :)

The Last Graduate is the second book in a Scholomance series, leading El by her final year. The book invites the reader to the school of witchcraft full of dangerous creatures and situations. The story opening the mysterious message form El's mum - stay away from Orion Lake. With the time passing, El will find herself in this world, and understand that she could be more than only Orion's girlfriend. The potential hidden in El's predispositions and availabilities could help her become a powerful witch, and she is learning how to believe in herself.
I felt a bit lost initially, as I didn't read Deadly Education (the first book of the series), maybe a little dictionary or something that could help enter this fantastic magical world.
I found the writing style a bit chaotic, which made me lost several times. Although I love El's sarcasm, it made me laugh out loud sometimes. The specific atmosphere created by Naomi Novik will transfer you into a different world. A spectacular cliffhanger ending stopped me one moment - I definitely look forward to the next book of this series. I can recommend that book for every fan of witchcraft and the magic world and for a reader who wants to try something new.


Thank you, NetGalley and Random House, for giving me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley, Random House UK Cornerstone and Naomi Novak for my arc of The Last Graduate in exchange for an honest review.

Publishing: 30th September 2021

As this is the sequel to A Deadly Education please note there maybe spoilers for the first book in this review.

Galadriel is experiencing a totally different senior year than she expected. Now that she is kind of dating Orion Lake she has managed to finally make friends in the Scholomance. Final year means graduation which is usually a death sentence for the students but El is determined that her and her friends will survive.

But as the practice courses get more and more difficult El realises that the school has been trying to tell her something all along and winning the battle is only the beginning; winning the war is what counts.

I listened to the first book on audio shortly before beginning this one and surprised myself with how much I enjoyed it, I was really looking forward to The Last Graduate and it didn’t disappoint. The characters are well written and flawed I particularly love the humour between El and Orion. There are many laugh out loud moments.

The whole book is fast paced and keeps the reader turning the pages to find out how the school year will end. And what an ending!! Although there were elements of the cliffhanger that I found slightly predictable the idea behind the end of the book was clever, well written and has definitely left me desperate for the next book to come out already. If you’ve been looking for a magic school book that brings the adult to young adult, complete with dark magic great flirting and sarcastic humour then this is the series for you.

I went in remembering the issues and discussion surrounding the MC's attitude towards her own heritage from book 1. I hope book 2 would fix it in some way or address it. But no. We got more. yay..

The story follows on straight from the end of book 1. I don't even think there has been more than a minute since book 1 finished. The plot doesn't reveal itself for a while but we all know she is a senior and will graduate that year.

I have issues with the worldbuilding in here. We have a very narrow view in the book. It's all told from El's point of view and we are only told what she choices to tell us. We are only (for example) given the information about the 5th floor being the top floor and has no ceilings but the walls run up into infinity when she inspects a 5th-floor room and mentions it because she didn't bother checking the ceiling cause there is none... The is a constant stream of new information. Some will call it breadcrumbs, I would call it intentionally leaving your readers blind.

Love the magic in here. I love how you have two types of magical energy, one good and one bad. You can choose which one to use, but once you go bad you can come back. And I love how the school teaches the students based on their affinity. Poor El can vanquish an army but not clean her room lol.

El is the main character and the narrator in this book. She is sarcastic, angry, and annoyed. She always has issues with emotions but in this book we see her becoming more focused on doing good rather than keep to herself. With great friends comes great responsibilities.

I love the school and I love the magic. I don't enjoy the way it's written but I'm curious to see if my theory is right, that there is a reason for it. I'm definitely not sure about the issues in the book which were only used for tension and not to further the plot. It really pissed me off and felt racist. But then the ending of the book happened and I realized I was super emotionally invested. I know don't know what to do for the next installment. .

This is Young Adult fantasy, Book 2 of the Scholomance series and is essentially what would happen if Harry Potter met the Hunger Games.

It's set in a school of wizardry, you get dropped in at 14 and if you're lucky you make it out alive at 18. The school is full of monsters that want to eat you because teenage wizards are the most delicious. Also the other pupils might try to take you out for your power too. It's essentially been every person for themselves up until this year when they start thinking maybe they can do things differently.

This picks up straight after book 1 and I was a little nervous having really enjoyed book 1 in case it didn't stack up. But oh it does.

Our main character has tried to fly under the radar until now as she is extremely powerful and now here we are at her last school year and she is trying to help everyone but they either don't trust her or don't believe her.

This is one of those books that just build and builds, it follows the school year so we run right up to graduation day which is a nightmare run through monsters. I got to the last 10% of this book and had to stop as my heart was racing, I was getting so stressed about whether they were going to make it! And then this ends on a serious cliffhanger, I cannot wait for book 3!

I love this series, I think it's so well done, definitely recommended

This book was the sequel to A Deadly Education by the author, and I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was an eventful sequel that picked up the things where we left. I love Novik's writing and the world she created. Dark academia and wizard school is a favourite of mine to read, and these meet the criteria perfectly.

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this brilliant book

2nd part of this series and wow it just blew my mind away...there is so much going on and though i want to compare it to harry potter because it does in a way remind you of hogwarts and wizards but this is by far a more dangerous place to learn your skills...as daily pupils are killed by monsters lurking about...

alliance's are made and broken during this epic storyline and that ending oh my goodness me... no spoilers but whens the next book in this series....honestly i cant wait....

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for giving me access to an ARC of this book. I loved the first book in the Scholomance series so I was absolutely delighted to get a hold of the next one a little bit early so that I could follow up on that cliffhanger as soon as possible. However, I couldn’t help but find myself a little disappointed with this new instalment in the series. I think now that the novelty of the murderous school and the magic system have worn off, I found the plot to be a weaker than I was expecting. It all just felt like a series of big, random set-piece events that hadn’t really been appropriately built up to or seeded in A Deadly Education or even really in the earlier parts of The Last Graduate. There were also entirely too many completely random, inconsequential characters who were introduced and who ended up not mattering even a little bit, which felt like an odd choice. I still found the novel very readable and in the last quarter or so of the book I was totally hooked into the story but after I put it down and had some time to reflect, the whole thing just felt a bit hollow and rushed. I’ll still most likely read the next book in the series because I want to know how the story ends, but I hope the next instalment returns to form and manages to recapture some of the magic of the first book.

I quite enjoyed Deadly Education, but The Last Graduate fell flat for me. The writing style wore down and made it difficult to read, and not much happened until the last 25% of the book. Good cliffhanger, but overall the book wasn’t good enough to blow me away. It felt like an endless stream of consciousness, I didn’t care about anyone, and I got lost at times.

3.5 stars

This is a series of slim books that somehow manage to pack a whole year in and a massive cast of characters. There are even more characters that demand page time this entry, including a lot of new ones, and they all feel fleshed out enough to hold space, despite not getting much. That's a hard feat to pull off, but Naomi Novik manages it.

THE LAST GRADUATE is also a really good example of setting the reader up to expect one thing, and then springing a twist on you. The title helps ease you into the expectation that builds from about the midpoint for what El is going to do, and then suddenly flips it at about the 67-75% point, twisting the previous actions of the school into a new light.

It's well done, as it makes sense, once you have enough time to think through it. The one flaw is that it did take a while for it to all make sense and sink in, as it changes a lot of things across the book. However, I loved that the title <em>still</em> held true under the twist - which is clever naming.

There were several places in the middle where I was getting a bit lost at times. The narrative style has El segue into a reminiscence of some vaguely connected fact, or an example of her point. While that <em>is</em> very much how I talk in real life, it does make it hard to follow at times, because by the time we re-join the conversation after a page or so, I've forgotten the detail being debated or the argument being had.

This and the running stab-fests of the middle bogged the pacing down a bit, making it tricky to get through it at times. I read this book about an hour slower than I should have, given the page count, and it was because of continually stopping in the middle, either to recall what had happened, or because my attention had wandered. This series so far have managed to pull of really satisfying endings, to make me feel glad I'd got through the bits that I'd struggled through.

This book ends on a real cliff-hanger, so it's a year to know just who made it out of the school at the very end. You see all of the big action sequence there at the end, except for the crucial last escape - which leaves a big question wide open...

El has made it to her final year of the Scholomance, not only with an alliance in place but also friends, something she would never have imagined when she entered the deadly school. Yet the school seems even more intent on putting her in danger this year, and her mother went out the way to get a message to her: stay away from Orion Lake.

The Last Graduate was just wonderful, and surprisingly full of warm and fuzzy feelings considering it’s about a magic school that wants to kill of a good chunk of its students. However, there is more to the Scholomance than you might first have thought.

El has grown so much since the first book, where she was just trying to survive in a world where she thought she had no one to turn to. She ends up scheduled in a classroom with a bunch of first years once a week and mals keep attacking it…and she just can’t stand by and see them die, even if it would makes life a lot easier.

Slowly El makes more and more friends, and students start to see her as more than just Orion’s girlfriend. Not that she is Orion’s girlfriend. And the hero is having trouble finding enough mals to kill, because El is badass and protecting everyone in the school. Turns out the New York enclave really needs Orion to do all that heroing.

There’s a lot in the first half about El trying to plan her school year and come up with a way to get through the graduation hall safely. Their gym is transformed into an obstacle course to prepare them, getting more and more difficult every time. And slowly several Big Things are revealed, and the pace builds and OMG, the end… Naomi Novik is going to make you suffer waiting for book three!

Since El had the potential to be a big bad witch at the start of the series, it’s been so lovely seeing her grow, form healthy relationships, and start looking out for others. Plus, her mouse familiar is awesome.

The first book took some time to warm to just because there was so much new information being thrown at me, but now I know what the mals are and how mana works, I was sucked straight in and I liked this even more than A Deadly Education.

Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book.

My thoughts on this are very similar to my thoughts on the first book. There are aspects to this that I really enjoy and other aspects that completely miss the mark. I will say that whatever your thoughts are on the first book I would expect that you would have very similar thoughts on this installment in the series.
I struggle with the writing style. It is very train of thought which then leads to world building tangents which aren't relevant to the plot and take me out of the story.
I do like the world and the characters and once again this ends on quite a cliff hanger so I will definitely continue and finish the series.

Additionally the character repeatedly states that "x students were speaking Chinese" and no they weren't, they would have most probably be speaking Mandarin. This really bugged me.

Oh. My. Goodness. I really loved A Deadly Education so I was very excited for The Graduate, and it did not disappoint one bit. If anything, it's even better. Without the constraints of world-building, the sequel is much pacier, the side characters have more time to develop, and the sarky banter just gets better and better.

If you enjoyed A Deadly Education, I would recommend this 110%, it's everything I loved about the first book dialled up, and all the minor niggles are gone.

I won't say anything about the plot because I don't want to spoil the incredibly fun ride but that ending? Holy hell, I will be waiting for book three VERY impatiently!

The Last Graduate is the second book in the Scholomance series, the third and final one is due to be published in September next year. It starts off more or less where The Deadly Education left off and dives straight into the milieu of the story, with El now in her new senior year. For this reason you really need to have read book to get a gist of the world and story. The writing style took a bit of getting used to, some of the sentences are incredibly long, often punctuated with a dash or a semi colon instead of a full stop, resulting in longwinded narrative. This, coupled with the occasional interruption of thought processes and information dumps and it was a bit of a slog to get through. However, I really enjoyed the wit and sarcastic comments sprinkled throughout and there are some really humorous moments.

The characters are brilliant and very varied. El is the queen of sarcasm and I loved her characterisation. I enjoyed following El’s and Orion’s relationship and, after a lot of build up over nearly two books, it finally arrived where we wanted it to be. That being said I would have loved to have seen more interactions between these two, some of the best scenes in the book were when they were together, I enjoyed their banter and I’m sure it would have helped me to commit more to the storyline. The storyline itself wasn’t quite up there for me and I struggled to engage with it’s repetitiveness. I think the novelty of this world has started to wear off, having seen it all before in A Deadly Education, and I became bored with the constant Mal decimation. The whole premise of this world didn’t quite work for me, I didn’t like the setting and I couldn’t keep up with the plethora of different Mals. A glossary would have been a useful addition.

This is definitely a book to read if you enjoy stories about schools of magic, wizardry and deadly creatures. However, even with the slightly absurd and extremely blatant cliffhanger ending, I don’t think I will be exploring this series any further. It was an enjoyable time, but I’ve had my fill of this world for now.

Thank you so much to the publisher for the eARC and the opportunity to review this book.

I was looking forward to this book after enjoying deadly education, and eventually it did not disappoint. Unfortunately it is quite a slow burner, and I had to force myself through the first half. However the second half are up for that!! Thst cliff hanger though...

I loved A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik so I was so excited to be able to read The Last Graduate as the end of the first book definitely left me gripped and needing to know what happened!

This book is so well written, the main character has so much sarcasm and wit it’s great, I also love the world description, Naomi manages to make you feel like you are actually there.

I really enjoyed this book, it was easy to read and I flew through it.

I adored the first in this series (A Deadly Education) and so I was chomping at the bit for the sequel. And it was absolute perfection. Stunning writing. Exciting plotting. A perfectly drawn world with incredible characters and a high octane, excellent story. Great diversity, good monsters, amazing magic and a heroine who I adore.

My only slight quibble is that it ends on an enormous cliffhanger (which I’m never overly fond of as a writing device) and that’s compounded by not being able to find out when we get the final instalment - which I will obviously be pre-ordering the second it becomes available.

If you loved the first book, you’ll be thrilled by the second. And if you missed the first one it needs to be at the top of the TBR pile. Really lovely.