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Galadriel, or El, is at the end of her junior year at a school where she and several thousand other teens with magical abilities are sent for four years in part for training, but more with the objective of keeping them safer from “maleficaria,” creatures who prey exclusively on people with magic. Teens are “bursting with mana” they’re still learning to use and control, so they’re easy targets for the mals when out in the real world, so the Scholomance was built mostly in the void, barely connected to the world, with lots of protective spells and careful designs put into it so mals have a much harder time entering the school. That’s not to say the students are safe — they have to be constantly on the lookout for all kinds of mals every day, anywhere they go in the school, and be ready to use the skills they’re learning to fight them off — but the odds of survival are at least better.
El is always on the alert, and she does everything she can to increase her store of mana so she has power to draw on to protect herself. She only has herself to rely on, after all: her mom is an independent practitioner of magic with no family to speak of, let alone an enclave of other wizards to protect and support her. And El is the opposite of her mom, who’s a hippie-type free spirit who gives away her magical healing help to others for free and is beloved by anyone who meets her. El has no friends, is considered “negative” even by her mother’s fellow commune dwellers, and has reason to believe she’s destined to be a powerful practitioner of some dangerous magic. She can only hope for the opportunity to show she has skills that would benefit an enclave so she can be invited into one after graduation.
Then she runs up against Orion Lake, who seems to be and have everything she’s not and doesn’t have: He not only belongs to the large and sought-after New York enclave; his mother is in position to lead it in the future. He has a slew of friends and plenty of support inside the school. And he just keeps going around saving people from mals, darn it, including El, and everyone else worships him. She makes it clear to Orion, however, that she isn’t one of those people who’s going to fall at his feet; in fact, she has no interest in him whatsoever.
So, of course, he starts hanging out with her, to her utter consternation.
A Deadly Education is one of those books that had me reading parts aloud and trying to explain to my husband (who happened to be sitting close by whenever I was reading) why it was so clever. The Scholomance is undeniably dangerous, and teens die right and left, but it’s just the norm for these kids who are pushing forward trying to simply stay alive until they “graduate” (leave the school by fighting through hordes of hungry mals to get back out into the real world). And El is such a fantastic narrator to have guiding readers through the story. She’s tough and gritty and has built up a hard shell around herself over her life and doesn’t think she’s friend material. She’s accepting of it, so when she is faced with some possibilities of people actually trying to be her friend, she doesn’t know what to make of it or to see their advances as such.
The book is clever, dryly witty, and what may seem almost strangely lighthearted for a story set in a world where kids are getting killed by monsters right and left. It had me savoring every last morsel of banter between the characters and details about the school and magical world. I had such a great time with it that it makes me quite disappointed the sequel isn’t already published. Naomi Novik is such a skilled writer, and it’s interesting to see here how the tone of this story is different from that of her other books I’ve read: Spinning Silver and Uprooted, which are both dark fairy tales with rich detail and atmosphere. Either way, I’m a fan of Novik.
Rated: High, for about 10 instances of strong language and 10 or 15 instances of mild and moderate language. Sexual content is very limited; the main character’s parents met and conceived her at the school when they were teens and not married. In one scene, a few girls talk about birth control and about something one’s mother warned them about sex. The book contains a fair amount of violence and plenty of peril, as the students constantly have to fight off monsters.
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