Title: A Deadly Education
Author: Naomi Novik
Released: September 29th, 2020 (Hardcover)
Series: The Scholomance
Trigger Warnings: Assault (graphic), attempted murder, death, violence
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Description: Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly.
There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate … or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.
El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.
Please keep in mind that this review contains spoilers for the entire book. Read with caution. If you click on “Read More”, it is under the assumption you either don’t care about spoilers or you’ve already read the book.
When I think back on what I read of this book, this feels like a fix-it type of story. A story that the author may have read and decided “I can fix this into something better” and maybe it’s because I’ve been around the fanfic world for a long time, I picked up on that right away. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to fix what’s perceived to be broken; I just think that if you, the author, have intended to do that – at least fix it instead of pointing things out and not doing anything about it.
Because this book has a lot of info-dumping. I think it’s easier to say that 85% of the book is the main character info-dumping about her history and the school’s history (including the students). Truthfully, I don’t mind it because the readers are presumably new to the world so that makes sense to me but the problem I have ultimately is how it’s paced. It was getting harder and harder to discern between the plot and the information being presented to me. In short, time was an illusion in this book and not in a good way.
It also felt that death didn’t have a true meaning; El was more focused on telling us more about the histories on what’s going on and when something does happen, either people waved it off students are being killed or El and Orion are praised for saving them (when it had been established over and over how the school was never meant to “save” people). It didn’t feel like the stakes were high enough and how less concerning it was that kids are dying around them and how people didn’t care enough… But we’re supposed to care when they do die?
I think we’re in El’s head too much because there’s quite a bit of information that I wish we didn’t know. Primarily the comment about how her mom would forgive Hitler as a litmus test of how good of a person she is. If I’m not supposed to take this in, then why did the author write it in? That’s weird. Another line that irks me more from this book (and series overall) is the line about how taking a bath or shower is too dangerous so people just don’t? And that’s… very strange behavior considering El is half Indian (and never mind certain stereotypes that come along with that). Do they not have spells that cleans them up if El is so privy to letting us know about how the school works?
I do think this should have been in a second world for all of El’s telling instead of showing. Cause that would at least explain more why El is so desperate to tell us the reader about the school. At least, I could understand the stakes more and won’t be so lost on how this takes place. Because there are times I would be in the moment and then El would interrupt the actual event only to info-dump about what happened, how we got there, etc. And then there’s a sudden time skip until the next time El interrupts the scene again. It doesn’t feel like it’s connected. It feels more like set pieces for a lecture. If that was the framing device, then I think there could have been a better way to do it because it did not work for me at all.
Overall, I do think the framing of the story should have been different than what we got. I do think more thought should have been put into this. I won’t continue the series, most likely, but I’ll give this author another chance cause I do like the prose and I do like the characters. Everything else… just wasn’t what I wanted or even expected. Nothing but disappointment, really.
Astronomy Of My Dreams 