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It’s senior year for El and the rest of the friends she has just so recently made. That means it’s going to be their turn at the end of the year to fight through a horde of maleficaria (monsters of all crazy types who feed off of mana, power that fuels wizards’ magic), just to get out of their school and return to the real world after being relatively protected from the mals for four years.
We met El in her junior year in A Deadly Education, where she got close to Orion Lake. He has tremendous magical power and loves to go around killing mals at the school. They fixed some important machinery in the school at the end of that year, and now they are seniors. What they learned the previous year is leading them to rethink how they should approach graduation themselves.
The danger at the Scholomance has traditionally led to the understanding that it’s every student for themselves. Now, however, El is thinking perhaps she can save a lot more students — perhaps, even, everyone. And that is such a radical idea that she doesn’t want to let the other kids know of her plans, even as she works with more and more of them to share skills in types and sizes of teams that are unprecedented.
El also comes to terms with her feelings for Orion, slowly accepting that she likes him and accepting his utter devotion to her, which seems incomprehensible. Their relationship, and her reactions to feelings on both sides, is entertaining and really quite sweet.
This series is so much fun. Having finished this second book, which ends on quite a cliffhanger, I’m not just eager to read the third because I want to see what happens next, but also because I so enjoy hanging out with these characters. El is such an entertaining character and narrator. She’s felt isolated and alone for so long and told herself it’s just fine to stay in her shell that it’s fun to see how she slowly emerges from the shell to gingerly accept friendship and love. She blossoms into just the type of person she is meant to be, but not someone “normal.” Her wry takes on everything she experiences are funny and constantly kept me grinning and wanting to share my delight of the cleverness with someone. I’ve not enjoyed a character as much since Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce, I think.
Novik’s characterization is wonderful, and her names and brief descriptions of all the kinds of maleficaria are fun and rather evocative of reading Dr. Seuss.
In short, I highly recommend The Last Graduate and the first book, A Deadly Education. It’s just one of the best young adult fantasy book series.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes 5 uses of strong language, 8 instances of moderate profanity, 4 uses of mild language, and 5 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are also 17 instances of British profanity (bl-). Sexual content includes references to some students having last flings before graduation, a few instances of kissing, and a sex scene between the main character and her boyfriend. There are some details and it goes on for a couple of pages but it’s not explicit. There are a couple of references to birth control options available to students. Violence is sporadic and almost exclusively is limited to the killing of monsters that are attracted to the students.
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