I really enjoyed Novik’s previous couple of books, the ones themed around Eastern European mythology, but this is quite a departure from that style. When I first heard it was yet another magical school, where terrible things happened to the students, I just rolled my eyes and decided to skip this trilogy, but after several people told me that it was worth reading, I borrowed it from a friend to give it a go.
The book is told in the first person by Galadriel (El) Higgins, a student at the Scholomance, a school for wizards that exists outside time and space, from which under half of the enrolling students graduate from. El is a pretty spiky protagonist. She has an affinity for spells of mass destruction, something that she desperately doesn’t want, and, despite her own delusions of practicality, she can’t bring herself to suck power out of the environment (read: people) around her to power her spells, so she spends her nights doing sit-ups and other painful and tedious things to build up the required mana to use basic mending magic.
The school is also full of monsters, most of which can’t make it past the hall that connects it to the outside world, but some get into the ducts and pipes and which pick off the weaker and less well connected students to provide a tasty meal. The big question is why you would ever send your children to such a place. The answer that the book provides is that it’s because it’s better than the alternative. Here, they’ve got some protection and it’s harder for the “mals” to get in, whereas in the outside world, the young wizards, who haven’t come into their full strength yet, would be easy pickings.
I’m not convinced, especially for the rich kids. In this world, the resource that makes a difference isn’t money, it’s being part of an enclave. Enclaves seem to be like the school: large communal spaces that exist in “the void”, offering protection from the mals. Why would residents of the enclaves still send their kids to the Scholomance? Why wouldn’t they keep them home and school and protect them there? But Novik uses the fact that they don’t to highlight the class system, whereby “independent” kids end up desperately currying favour with enclave kids to try and be offered a place in the enclaves. They end up doing most of the maintenance in the Scholomance, in the hopes of making alliances. The thing is, that even if they do, the enclave kids usually just use them as human shields, letting them take the hits while they escape the Scholomance after graduation.
It all sounds perfectly awful. And it mostly is. But we’re seeing it from a specific point of view. El is very much an outsider, who has few social skills and no alliances. We join her the year before in her penultimate year (and it’s nice to have a wizard school where we don’t start in first year and work our way up), with no friends and very few people even willing to tolerate her presence. But during the course of the book, we see, through her grudging eyes that not everyone is motivated entirely by self-interest, and that friendship, and even romance, is possible.
I don’t, for one moment, believe in the world of the Scholomance. I can’t believe that this was the only solution that the best magical minds of the age could work out to protect their children, but, despite myself (and despite her), I started to become fond of El, and I want to see where her story goes next.
It was a slow start, with a lot of infodumps in the first few chapters, but the pace really picked up towards the end of the book and I shall definitely be reading the sequel.
