BooksOfTheMoon

The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)

By Naomi Novik

Rating: 4 stars

It’s been a very long time since a series sucked me in as much as this one did. I was actively resentful, not just of having to go to work, but other fun things that took me away from finishing it. But finish it I did, and it was a fab and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

We pick up immediately from where we left off, with El having been pushed out the gate of the Scholomance by Orion, to deal with Patience himself. Obviously, this is a bit traumatic, and despite her efforts, she can’t bring him back. But time is not on her side, so rather than being left to grieve, she’s pulled into the thick of things when there’s an attack on London enclave. And from there, it’s a whirlwind of jetsetting around the world, hopping from enclave to enclave (including a trip back to the Scholomance itself) as the revelations continue to pile on. And when we find out just what Orion really is and how he gained his very specific powers, it’s as heartbreaking for us as it is for El.

El reminds me of a mix of Wednesday Addams and Granny Weatherwax. She’s incredibly powerful, and very angry at having to be the good one. She could lean in to her power and nobody in the world could stop her, but she makes Granny’s choice again and again, having to rein in her dark side. In this she’s helped and kept grounded by her friends, particularly Aadhya and Liu, who have become not just allies, but BFFs. Liesel from the second book plays a much bigger role here, joining El’s circle of friends, almost despite herself. but Liesel clearly does likes El, even if I wasn’t entirely keen on the leaning into stereotypes of German efficiency.

One issue I had was that for the first half or more, it felt like El had very little agency. She was just jumping from one crisis to the next, without ever getting time to sit and decide what she wants to do. And by the end of it, I honestly didn’t think it was going to end well. When we find out the truth of how enclaves are founded, and the truth of Orion, I was sure that there could only be one outcome. But Novik sidestepped that and gave us something more hopeful.

I like that there’s no clear “bad guys” here. The closest that we get is Orion’s mum, but even she has reasons for what she does and can’t just be written off. When it comes down to it, her objectives and El’s aren’t that dissimilar. There’s lots of shades of grey, which honestly makes for a more interesting story.

I love the fact that sexuality basically isn’t a thing here. El turns out to be bi and nobody bats and eyelid, and she’s not the only one. In fact, there are several queer relationships that are just there and valid. This is, absolutely, the future that liberals want! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to search AO3 for fanfic of the El/Orion/Liesel polycule that is so clearly missing here.

Book details

ISBN: 9780593597699
Publisher: Random House
Year of publication: 2022

The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

By Naomi Novik

Rating: 4 stars

This book picks up pretty much immediately after where the last one ended, with El entering her final year in the Scholomance, and working with her new allies (and, indeed, friends) to try and graduate (ie leave the Scholomance without dying), as well as working out her feelings for class “hero” Orion. It’s a setup that gets torn apart relatively quickly as El realises that her conscience won’t let her just play the odds to get just her group out. It’s very much about deciding that the only way to win is to not play, and changing the rules.

The book starts off by having the Scholomance throw everything it can at El. I had wondered about this in the previous book, where it seemed like the school had a slightly wonky AI that was trying its best, but here it does seem out to get her. Why would the wizards who created the school make it malevolent, if they were trying to keep their kids safe? That question does get answered (and it’s quite the revelation), and the solution that El and her friends come up with is pretty jaw-dropping.

El’s character arc continues here, as she begins to accept that, even in the Scholomance, people aren’t intrinsically selfish and may be willing to work for the good of the many, rather than just themselves. She becomes more aware of when she can’t do something herself and becomes able to ask for help.

And then there’s that ending. It builds to a great crescendo of mutual aid and everyone working together, and then wham, you get that ending. I think if I didn’t have the next one sitting next to me, ready to go, I may have thrown the book across the room! Thankfully, I did have the next one, so I was able to just emit something between a gasp and a chuckle and be angry that it was late and I needed to go to bed like the responsible adult I am, rather than go straight into the next one.

It took me the whole of the first book to get over my nitpicking of the worldbuilding, but I tore through this book. Very readable, with a great protagonist and a hopeful message.

Book details

ISBN: 9781529100907

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

By Naomi Novik

Rating: 4 stars

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.

Book details

ISBN: 9781529100877
Publisher: DelRey Books

Illuminations

By T. Kingfisher

Rating: 4 stars

Rosa is the youngest of a family of magical artists. While bored, and wanting to help her family, she discovers a box that seems determined to keep her away. Obviously, this can’t stand so she works out how to get past the defences and open it. Hilarity mayhem ensues.

This is a lovely little YA story, the first half of which I found immensely frustrating, as Rosa hid what she’d done from her (loving) family and tried to resolve things on her own. It drives the plot and seems like the sort of thing a young person would do, but it’s not until things come out into the open and everyone starts working together that things start to work out. I’m sure there’s a lesson there…

Rosa’s family is sketched but they’re all lovely. Her parents were killed in a fire when she was young, but her grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousin are all delightful, with their own quirks to differentiate them. Uncle Alfonso’s kindness and joy in life especially stand out.

I loved the idea of these magical “illuminations”, that have to be so specific (to keep mice away, you can draw any sort of cat, but it has to have blue eyes) and are used in both big things, such as cleaning the water in the city’s canal, or tiny things, like stopping sparks spreading a fire and are all over the city.

It’s a delightful little story, quick and fun to read. It’s standalone, but has the same sort of feel as Minor Mage or A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking.

Book details

Publisher: Red Wombat Studio
Year of publication: 2022

The Blind Dragon: A Tale from the Canon of Tarn

By Peter Fane

Rating: 3 stars

When I started reading this book, I wondered if I’d stumbled into something mid-series, as there was an awful lot of stuff just thrown at you, as if you should know about the civil war in this kingdom and what the political situation was. But from looking around online, this is Fane’s first novel, although I get the impression that he’s been building and telling stories in this world for a long time. Just regarding the physical book, when I picked it up, it looked like a good hefty, 450 page tome, but when I opened it, the whole thing is double-spaced, so it would probably be about half that size if it was more traditionally formatted.

The book tells a coming of age story, as Anna Dyer, an apprentice to the dragon riders of Dávanor has to overcome treachery from within her duchy with the aid of the newly hatched, blind dragon Moondagger, with whom she forms a bond.

The book keeps up the pace, with lots happening on a very frequent basis, but I’m not sure we really get enough time spent getting to know Anna to fully appreciate some of the more emotional beats in the story. The book is also very violent, with faces being bitten off, entrails ripped out and more. Maybe I’m just getting old, but that, and the culture of honour and violence that Anna (a fourteen year old girl) is embedded in seemed a bit over the top to me. But then I’m also at a point where swearing fealty to nobility and the feudal system seems like a terrible idea. As Monty Python so memorably put it: strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

Looking beyond that, though, despite a Surfeit of Capitalisation, the book is well-written and kept my attention all the way through. Coming out the end, I feel that I better understand the world. I was amused that in the chronology at the end, despite having a 12,000 year history, about 10,000 of those are just marked at “the plague years”. Sometimes I feel that writers throw around big numbers like that with abandon without really pausing to think about them. Science fiction is really bad for that, but fantasy can be too. I’d remind you that the whole of recorded human history, is barely 6000 years. We have literally no experience with any single organisation stretching half that length of time, never mind the tens of thousands that this book is bandying around.

Fun enough, although despite the book literally being called “The Blind Dragon”, the dragon’s blindness was barely a feature, beyond the first few pages, throwing in a magical workaround in passing. As I say, an entertaining way to spend a few hours, but I’ll not be looking out the sequels.

Book details

ISBN: 9781944296025
Publisher: Silver Goat Media

Kidnapped (David Balfour, #1)

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Rating: 3 stars

David Balfour is newly an orphan at seventeen. A message from his late father directs him to seek out his uncle Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws to make his fortune. Said uncle, however, betrays him and sees him on a ship bound for slavery in the Americas. Through a series of unlikely events, David makes it back to Scotland with his new companion Alan Breck Stewart and begins a journey across the highlands to reclaim his inheritance.

I didn’t know much about this book before I saw an absolutely stonking theatrical production put on by the National Theatre of Scotland. I adored that and was inspired to seek out the original text, which didn’t disappoint (mostly). It’s a cracking read, well-paced, full of adventure, and male bonding. Despite having lived in Scotland for well over half a lifetime, I confess I don’t know its history hugely well. But I did, coincidentally, just read up a bit on the Jacobite rebellion not long before reading the book, which provided invaluable context.

I do think it slightly ran out of steam towards the end. By the time David sees Alan away on the ship to France and turns away to go to a bank, I was just sort of left bemused. Like there were a few pages missing, maybe? But no, a quick check on Wikipedia reveals that’s where the book ends. Seems like an odd note to end on, but the main body of the book is a great fun read, that still works into the 21st century.

Book details

ISBN: 9780439295789
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Year of publication: 2002

The Bronzed Beasts

By Roshani Chokshi

Rating: 4 stars

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really have that high expectations of this after the other two books in the series, but I think it may have been my favourite of them. Despite a huge eye-roll at the way the last book ended, this one picks it up and runs with it. Séverin appeared to betray his friends and ran away with Ruslan, the patriarch of the Fallen House to become a god, but he left a secret message with Laila, which she immediately destroyed after waking up, in a fit of pique. So now his friends don’t have the clues he left them.

Of course, they figure it out anyway and the story is mostly Séverin trying to redeem himself against the anger of Laila and Enrique; Hypnos was all too willing to forgive, and Zofia understands what he was trying to do. So after the gang gets back together Séverin spends most of the time (when he’s not smugly solving mysteries) making big puppy dog eyes at the others.

The big bad didn’t really feel all that much of a threat, the main plot driver was the quest to find the maguffin (it’s no less a maguffin for being a location rather than an object). There’s some great sequences en route (I think the big wall on the island, after the lake was my favourite) but it didn’t really feel to me that the characters got that much development. Poor Hypnos, once again, gets hardly any time in his head (although he did get at least one PoV chapter this time) despite being one of the more interesting of the group. Laila is mostly just angry and brooding, and a driver of the plot rather than an active participant. As usual, Zofia and Enrique were great fun (is anyone else getting a bit of a Parker and Hardison from Leverage vibe from them?), although there was no single moment as great as Zofia on the glass stag from the last book.

The ending was interesting and somewhat unexpected. Other reviewers didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t actually mind it too much. It definitely had more melancholy than I was expecting, but still, a good conclusion to the series. I don’t think it’s one I’ll reread but I don’t regret my time spent with it, and it went out on a high.

Book details

ISBN: 9781250144614
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Year of publication: 2022

The Silvered Serpents

By Roshani Chokshi

Rating: 3 stars

So it turns out that my worries about this being too grimdark for me and make me nope out of the series, a la The Kingdom of Copper, didn’t come to pass. While I rolled my eyes as Séverin’s descent into full emo-dom (all he needed was some black eyeshadow), he, and the rest of the crew, never became so unlikeable that I didn’t want to spend time with them.

So in this volume, the crew, aided by the Matriarch of House Kore of France and the Patriarch of House Dazbog of Russia are searching for a book called The Divine Lyrics, which the Fallen House thought could be used to become gods, and which Séverin secretly wants to use to undo his mistakes, and maybe even bring Tristan back from the dead. Yeah, he’s deep in the ‘denial’ and maybe ‘bargaining’ stage of grief at the moment. Tristan’s death has changed the dynamic amongst the crew as a whole. They are sadder and less united than ever, but they’ve got to pull together for this one last big heist.

Despite Séverin’s overblown angst, the character I possibly felt most for was Hypnos. He’s trying his best to fit in and be part of the group, but they never see him as one of them. And neither, it seems, does the author, who never gives us chapters from his point of view, unlike the others. I hope this changes in the next book, since it feels like Hypnos has earned his place in the group by now. And despite his surface layer of charm and easy manner, I get the feeling he’s someone who’s deeply insecure and needs to be part of something bigger than himself.

I didn’t feel Laila got an awful lot to do in this book. She was there mostly to both angst towards Séverin and be a source of angst for him. I hope she gets to be more active in the next book. Zofia and Enrique continue to be my favourite characters, although even they don’t escape the veneer of gloom that has overlaid the group, with the former looking much more towards her ill sister back in Poland, and the latter thinking about revolution and freedom for his native Philippines. Although Zofia does provide one of the best images in the whole book, as she charges to the rescue, atop a stag made of ice with a flaming sword in her hand. It’s magnificent!

Spoiler
In the last book, Matriarch Delphine of House Kore was nothing more than a shadowy antagonist, who, for unknown reasons, stole Séverin’s inheritance. Here, the author tries to show us a different side to her – after the bombshell in the epilogue of the first book. I’m not sure she entirely succeeds. While she believes that she did what she did to protect Séverin, I don’t really understand how. And I still don’t understand why she appears to have sacrificed herself near the end of the book. I read the passage several times, but it still didn’t make sense to me.

With time ticking away until Laila’s nineteenth birthday, and the prophesied date of her death, the last book has a lot of plot to play with, but also a lot to tie up.

Book details

ISBN: 9781250144584
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Year of publication: 2021

The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves, #1)

By Roshani Chokshi

Rating: 3 stars

In Belle Époque France, at the end of the nineteenth century, Séverin Montagnet-Alarie is bitter that his inheritance as the heir to one of the great hidden powers of France was stolen from him. Then he is offered a change to recover his heritage, and he gathers his unlikely band together to pull off the heist of a lifetime.

So this book wasn’t about “getting the gang together” for the heist, as I thought. At the start, they’re already a well-oiled team, having “acquired” many artifacts in the past. Each of them has a reason for being where they are and doing what they do. Whether it’s engineer Zofia who doesn’t understand people, but does understand numbers, and has a debt to pay; or historian Enrique, whose mixed heritage leaves him an outsider wherever he goes, and who hopes that if Séverin gets what he wants, it will offer him an in. And then there’s Laila, dancer and baker extraordinaire, searching for a hidden book and hoarding her own secret.

It wasn’t until I came to review the book on GoodReads did I see that it’s classed as YA, which sort of explains a few things. Firstly, the characters are all young: in their late teens or early twenties, and second, there are so many strong emotions flying around. It was somewhat exhausting to read, but then I’m a guy in his forties now, when things are a little more sedate than when you’re a teenager and have All The Feels.

I’m a bit worried by the ending, that this might be a case where the rest of the trilogy delves into miserablist territory. I had that with City of Brass, and never made it past the second book because of how miserable it was and how much I hated all the characters. Given the end here, I’m a bit worried that might happen here too (although I hope I could never hate Zofia or Enrique). I’m still going to give book two a go though.

Book details

ISBN: 9781250144553
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Year of publication: 2020

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking

By T. Kingfisher

Rating: 5 stars

Mona is a teenage girl with the very specific magical ability to work with bread. From telling it not to burn, to making gingerbread men dance, Mona is the very definition of a minor wizard. But she’s happy being a baker, working with her Aunt Tabitha, and using her magic to help her. Until the other wizards of the city start disappearing, until soon she’s on the run for her life. And then, she’ll be the only thing standing between her city and an invading army.

I loved this book. It was charming, but with enough of a hard edge to make it worth savouring. Mona is a great protagonist, whose actions feel believable all the way through (up to and including the giant gingerbread golems). She doesn’t want to be doing this, she’s a teenage girl, and she’s (rightly) angry that all this has fallen on her shoulders. Why wasn’t the duchess stronger? Why didn’t other people speak out? Why was it left up to her?

But despite it all, she rises to the occasion (pun very much intended). With obligatory Little Orphan Boy (Spindle) at her side and with the help of her familiar – a sourdough starter called Bob (really, it’s scarier than it sounds) – she fights bigotry, rogue wizards and bureaucrats (as well as the aforementioned invading army).

The world is well-developed, without any big infodumps and the writing is clear and a joy to read. I’d love to read more of Mona’s adventures, but that would require her to be a hero again, which would make her angry, and she might set Bob on me.

Book details

Publisher: Red Wombat Studio

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