What would you do if you were basically in a dark version of Hogwarts, where the semi-sentient school barely cares if you live, and you can’t leave for 4 years? If you’re El, short for Galadriel, you spend the first 2. 5 years of that letting your prickly, angry, bitter exterior prevent anyone from getting close to you.
This is where A Deadly Education starts off, about halfway through El’s junior year at the Scholomance. We find out over the course of the novel why she is such a loner, and it’s largely understandable, though she does herself no favors in that regard either, but things start to change during the second half of her junior year as she gets to know Orion.
The novel is very info-dumpy at the beginning. However, El’s character makes that engaging. The information she imparts to readers is intermingled with comments about her life and perspective on things and often provided in a moody, sarcastic way. Here are a couple of quotes that give you an idea of who she is: “I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment” and “I’d got used to my ordinary level of low-grade bitterness and misery, to putting my head down and soldiering on. Being happy threw me off almost as much as being enraged.”
There’s a kind of confining feeling to this book. None of the students can step foot outside of the Scholomance until they graduate, which only about half of them do because lots of creatures (mals) that want to eat them make their way into the school, though this is still better than the alternative of being outside of the school at their age. Life is repetitive with the constant stress of being on the lookout for mals, even in the cafeteria food (“. . . I added, ‘The rice pud isn’t, by the way,’ and he jerked his head around and promptly went after the glutinous maggots waiting in the tray”). On top of that, El is pretty socially isolated, and all of this adds up to a constricted feeling that helps readers feel what it must be like to be in this almost prison-like setting.
That constrained feeling decreases in the second book, The Last Graduate. While there’s still a prison-like feeling, and El even uses that work in this book, her life is much less confined now because she has more of a social life. There are people she is connected to and with whom she shares mutual affection. She’s formed a graduation alliance with some of them, and they start practicing for how they’re going to get of the graduation hall without being eaten by mals.
However, the Scholomance has a different plan it wants El and the other seniors working on, and it was interesting to watch how this came together. By now it’s pretty clear that El is super-powered when it comes to destructive spells, and it would be easy for the book to get boring when you think a character might be able to tackle anything that is thrown her way. Novik solves this by giving El other sources of conflict, in addition to the question of whether everything will actually go as planned because while she may be powerful, she’s not invincible.
As an aside, I loved the insults that El directs towards others (including Orion). They’re so creative and I wish I’d started keeping track of them earlier. The ones I did make note of: “You bag of jumbled screws” and “you cartwheeling donkey.”
The Golden Enclaves picks up immediately after The Last Graduate leaves off. El wants desperately to get Orion out of the Scholomance and is then deeply grieving when she can’t. However, her time grieving at home with her mother is interrupted by Liesel, requesting her help with a maw-mouth attacking London enclave. El agrees to go and then has world-hopping adventures at various enclaves and back at the Scholomance.
The other two books touch on the politics and unfairness of enclaves and enclavers, and this one delves into that as well, but more importantly focuses even more on the horrific way that enclaves are actually created. El’s choices are high-stakes because she’s trying to change actions that enclavers took, and would happily continue to take, that affect the rest of the wizarding world. Not everyone knows the horror of it, but enough of them do and choose to go through with it anyway.
Fortunately, El is not on her own. Somewhat to her surprise, her friends and allies from the previous books are still her friends and allies, and they really want to support her, and not for purely selfish reasons. She continues to grow as a person and become more ok with both accepting and asking for help. I really enjoyed this trilogy as a whole. 4 stars to all of it, with the last book being the best.
The Answer Is No
I’m tacking this one on because I read it so quickly and it doesn’t really need its own post. This is the second Backman work I read. While it was vastly different from A Man Called Ove, the sense of humor is similar. However, in this short story/novelette, Backman leans into satirical absurdism (think Catch-22), whereas the humor in Ove is more grounded. Main character Lucas is a happy loner who has cut interpersonal interaction out of his life as much as possible: “All he did was to remove the one thing that makes almost all people unhappy: other people.” He works from home, orders his favorite takeout, plays video games, and is happy. Until.
Until the board of his apartment building knocks on his door because they’re investigating a frying pan that was left outside on the apartment grounds. Things escalate from there, with Lucas being unwillingly drawn into illogical bureaucratic nonsense and interacting with at least one neighbor who is equally illogical (e.g., expressing that her using his WiFi and taking some of his cheese isn’t stealing because “How can it be theft it we’ve never even met?”). His reasonable attempts to help only backfire and his peace is increasingly shattered.
From what I have read of his works, Backman is not a nihilistic writer. He combines humor with heart in a lovely way, with Lucas being able to grow as a person and let people into his life so that the absurdism doesn’t take over completely, though the nonsense never quite ends. This was such a blast to read and I would recommend it to anyone.