A Deadly Education, Novik, Naomi. New York : Del Rey, [2020]

Content Warnings:  Death, Violence, Gore, Murder, Child death, Death of a parent

Being a good person can be really freaking annoying.  Galadriel “El” Higgins knows this all too well.  When she was a child, her great-great-great grandmother prophesied that she would become a great and terrible force for evil.  Now, training at the Scholomance, the self-powered, magically-run school for young magic users, her magic seems to agree.  It wants to destroy, to build super volcanos and douse the world in flames.  El just wants a spell to clean her dorm room.  She thinks she’s earned some teenage angst.

Living in a school that is liable to kill her is not easy in the first place.  Not having anyone to sit with at lunch can literally be your doom.  (Monsters sneaking in and looking for a magical snack prey on unpopular freshmen.)  Students from certain families have an automatic leg-up.  Those who grew up in Enclaves, concentrated communities of magical power and safety, enter the school already allied to each other with coveted “reserved Enclave spots” ready to hand out to the best of the best who will join them.  Everyone knows to look out for themselves.  Very few seniors make it through the monster-filled gauntlet that is Graduation.

As a non-Enclaver working against her natural magic-style, El is already working with both hands tied behind her back.  She is not going to grin while she bears this.  If her bad attitude loses her friends, then at least they do not have to worry about her destructive magic as well as getting to class on time.

Then, El runs into Orion Lake.  Literally.  An Enclaver who has been the school’s White Knight since his freshman year, saving everyone from the dangers of the Scholomance in the stupidest ways possible, Orion is everything El is not.  Naturally they hate each other.  El, however, may be the only person capable of saving Orion from his self-sacrificing ways and getting him to the end of the school year and Orion may be the only person El can turn to when she learns that she would rather die trying to help others than survive and remain alone.

A Deadly Education is the first book in the now completed Scholomance trilogy.  The second book, The Last Graduate, came out in 2021 and the final volume, The Golden Enclaves, was released last September.  The Alamance Public Library system has all three.

The worldbuilding is as fun as it is complex.  El’s snarky, but full-hearted first-person narration makes everything hilarious and grounded, even when the story dives into classism, murder, and grief.  In the darkest of places, we can find the best of ourselves even if that makes everything else more complicated, dangerous, and just plain annoying.

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Librarian at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.