Ratings367
Average rating4
DNF. It was such a struggle to get to page 100 but after every reading session I still wasn't sure what I just read.
Não me senti investida nem nos personagens nem na ambientação da história. Apenas 2 personagens no livro inteiro recebem uma caracterização decente - El e Orion. Todo o resto é reduzido a nomes e caracterizado pelo idioma que falam e esteriótipos estúpidos ou incorretos. A história é contada em primeira pessoa pela nossa protagonista El e ela passa parágrafos e parágrafos fazendo seus monológos que muitas vezes eu esquecia pq ela começou a pensar naquilo.
Esse livro tem muita encheção de linguiça que a autora pensa que dá pra classificar como worldbuilding e que no fim não acrescenta em nada. Sabemos muito sobre enclaves, dos maw-mouths, da diferença de mana e malia, malificer e wizards e é isso! A Scholomance em si fica dificil de imaginar. A autora poderia ter passado menos páginas reduzindo seus personagens a meros “fulana, que fala tal idioma” e feito um worldbuilding mais efetivo.
Ler que Scholomance é uma Hogwarts mortal é realmente de despertar a curiosidade, afinal, quem não adora uma história de escola de magia, cheia de lore? Mas aqui a lore que é apresentada não acrescenta em muita coisa e muitas vezes Novik atira no próprio pé com a tentativa de diversidade.
Não gostei de nenhum dos dois personagens que a autora desenvolve bem.
Não pretendo continuar a série, a não ser que alguém consiga me convencer que ela melhora os pontos que levantei na resenha...
Minha busca por uma série de escola de magia que preste continua.
Take a basic adolescent novel about fitting in, friendship and crushes and then make all of that real: if you don't have any friends, you will literally be eaten by monsters. If the golden boy reciprocates his crush on you, it will literally save your life. That's the premise of Deadly Education and it's kind of a fascinating one.
I think Novik's characters were well-developed, especially to explore the way that adolescence can feel so life-or-death. Sometimes school fantasy can feel twee, but I felt like Novik's monsters felt real, serious threats and this was done well.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Do you want to be a mighty wizard?
Do you want to join a group of like minded sociopathic individuals to get on and join the elite of the wizarding world? Then:
Welcome to A Deadly Education!
(Or how to win friends and influence people, so that the nasty things don't eat you)
Right, let's get the obvious out of the way. This is a magic school for witches and wizards and this is not the sole property of he who shall not be named. Okay? Phew, glad we got that sorted.
What we have here is a tale of friendship against adversity. The old romantic mismatch. A kind of Harry met Sally situation in which the good guy is annoyingly good and the damsel is constantly distressed at being regularly rescued by the good guy, even though she is some mega evil witch that has a prophecy attached to her (whoa, stop it! We got those comparisons out of the way in the first sentence. Didn't you know that in quite a lot fantasy stories, there's a chosen one with a prophecy attached? Well, don't you? Jeez anyone would think that this is a HP reference. Well it's not! Okay?).
Glad we got that out of the way!
The story revolves around Galadriel (or El for short) who is a pupil at the Scholomance, a school for witches and wizards whose first lesson that they have to learn, is to get safely through breakfast before they become breakfast. The Scholomance is a magic school that is populated by magical teens that have been whisked away from their parents and have to board in a school that has a vast array of different ways to kill you in some horrible way. From flesh eating maggots in the porridge to demonic corridors that will strip the skin from your bones, there is an endless way to get yourself killed. Add to that psychopathic students who will happily kill you for no apparent reason, this makes my days at school seem positively balmy in comparison.
On top of that, you have to have political skills that are reminiscent of a medieval court. Where you have to form alliances or trade something of worth in order to fix your door, brush your teeth or even get a shower This place is tough beyond belief and our hero, El is always letting us know how dangerous, how tough and how many different ways to kill you there are. On every page. Okay, okay we get it.
This school is flippin dangerous!
Surprisingly, El does not have many friends. However, this changes when the handsomely, charming popular kid, Orion Lake, starts to take an interest in her and forces his friendship on her, whether she likes it or not. However, as the story progresses we see that even though they are at the opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, they both share similar experiences and are both equally isolated.
In a Deadly Education, Novak's wizarding school is not all jolly hockey sticks and full of quaint little traditions that hark back to a corner of England that is stuck in the innocence of yesteryears. It's filled with scary monsters and super creeps. It is the dog eat dog world of a capitalist society where the more power and influence you have, the more likely it is that you will survive. It juxtaposes the world outside, which again is not filled with a lovely, cutesy world that resides in the past. In Novak's world, being a wizard is a dangerous lifestyle which attracts the monsters that live under your bed so that they can kill you and eat you.
Once you get past the myriad ways in which you can die, be eaten or be killed and then eaten, you get to the heart of the story. Which is, survive. Simple as that. Everything is geared towards surviving the experience of school and hopefully get out of there. That is if you can get past a cornacopia of nightmarish beasts at the graduation ceremony that are hell bent on doing all the things mentioned earlier.
Why anyone would want to be a wizard in A Deadly Education is beyond me. I would use the same tactics that the mundanes (the non - magical community) use. Don't believe in magic. Simple as that. The mundanes do not believe in it and that saves them from the monsters. Otherwise, it looks like you are in for a life of looking over your shoulder and elevating yourself to the rank of paranoid sociopath.
On the whole, I enjoyed A Deadly Education and the story of the snarky main character and how she manages to get through everyday and how her world expands from a world of one to her development of ‘friends'. This is a fantastic setup for the rest of the series, it sets up the world, the characters and is just the start of the story. Will I be reading the next one? Hmmm, I think I will, I wouldn't mind seeing what happens to El and the gang.
Given that I LOVE Uprooted and enjoy magic school settings, I had been eagerly anticipating A Deadly Education, but I was disappointed. Although I actually did like the overall story and the dynamic between the two main characters (and the main character herself, once I got to better know and understand her), there was SO MUCH exposition. It seemed there was more explanation than actual story, and the attempts at injecting some humor into the long-winded, rambling narrative fell flat for me.
Full Review on My Website
Abandoned after first chapter but I will concede that I am probably the wrong audience for this book; it would more likely appeal to mid-teens. I usually love YA fiction, but I just could not get past the arrogant whine of the main character. I flipped through to spot read to see if her entitled attitude would dial back and then realized I wasn't invested enough in the hints of the story to come presented in chapter one, so back to the library for something different.
I read through this book quite quickly and enjoyed. I then for the next 25 hour I could not stop thinking about it. The book can be read as a simple magical coming of age story. Or about overcoming predgidous. Or as a fantasy adventure. It can as be read as a critique of capitalism and castism. It has all the appeal of HP but without the sexism and morality tropes. While it has shade of dark like Garth Nix, Novik maintains her delightfully unique voice. I am greatly looking forward to the sequel.
This was a perfectly good book. I've read the bad reviews, I've read the book. I enjoyed it. Please try reading the book once before forming opinions based on other people's reviews. There's a high rated 1 star review that isn't entirely accurate.
—Minor spoilers in review—
• We had the soft boy/snarky girl trope in this and I loved it. It was hilarious!
Unusual and exciting! A fun, new kind magical school. I can't wait to see what happens next!
In many ways, you would think that the wizard school trope has been done to death, but Naomi Novik proves there is life to this subject still. Her world and school is a much darker affair than the typical Harry Potter-esque wizarding school. Death does stalk the corridors. There is no adult teaching staff, which gives a slight lord of the flies vibe at times. The characters themselves are darker, and greyer in their morals. The imperative to survive outways any heavy moralizing. This is Harry Potter, the Grimdark version.
Our main protagonist is a dark wizard waiting to happen. In this world magicians have affinities. Hers is the magic of death and destruction. The spells she can learn easily are ones that cause carnage. It is an interesting moral quandary. The school itself is also a character in its own right - it provides what it thinks the student needs, but is infested with evil creatures and traps that the students have to learn to survive. And these things are deadly - plenty of people do die from these traps in these pages.
I will acknowledge that there are some issues that have been raised with the writing of ethnic characters in the book - Naomi has acknowledged and apologized for the misuse of the word ‘locs' in an unintendedly insensitive way in a late edit, which will be corrected back in future editions. This was fair criticism and it is good the way that the author has owned up to it. The other criticism has come across as a little bit overblown - this is a magical alternative reality. To me, none of this detracts from what is a supremely dark and intriguing take on a magical school story.
I enjoyed this immensely and can highly recommend it. It was easy to read yet intriguingly dark.
I really liked the story althought the world building was all a bit vague to me. I don't really like the giant whole chapter lessons that the book gives about the world. It take you totally out of the story, as does the adressing of the audience which is weirdly done about three times totally out of nowhere.
I like the story of El getting friends and learning of a new way to live but all that shit about Orion wasn't great to me. Especially given the ending, where her mother says to not trust him. I have the vague feeling that the second book is just going to be pining and confused romatic squabbles which I really do not care for.
I just couldn't get into the main character, El's, long-winded and negative narrative. All the characters in this book are unlikeable and whiny. I got halfway through this book and realized I just didn't care what happens. This is one series I will not continue.
To put it simply, I enjoyed it enough to pick up book #2 immediately after finishing.
An enjoyable twist on the ‘magical kids go to magic school' idea. It did seem a bit odd to me that we never really see or interact with any kind of teacher - i mean, they talk about going to classes and stuff, but.... is there ANY adult supervision at all? You'd think we'd see something about that?? - but overall I really liked the idea.
Oh man. I didn't really have a good time with this book. It started off with a really interesting premise but I thought the storytelling got lost with a ton of infodumps. The main character was kinda spunky and held her own, but also seemed to be mired in this “look at how massively unpopular I am” mode for more than three-quarters of the book, which got rather grating after a bit.
The book is centered around a school, the Scholomance, which is some kind of... weird building of concentric circles put together by magic where it rotates students' dormitories down a level every year. By the time they're seniors and ready to graduate, the students find themselves in the lowest level and the center of the whole building, the graduation hall, where they have to fight their way past a horde of dark magic monsters to get to the exit and leave the school. It's kind of like Hunger Games meets Harry Potter.
While this sounds nice in theory, the world building was a little too complex imo. Even when I was more than halfway through, I still wasn't completely sure what the different magic sources - mana and malia - were, or what the difference was between the two types of mages, artificers and malificers. It seemed like every chapter or so our protagonist Galadriel (because of course she's named Galadriel) goes on another info dump about what an enclave is, what the classes are like, what the school cliques means, what this and that is. Because it's also told from a first person perspective, the story always feels like someone trying to tell you some juicy gossip that went down, but then keeps interrupting their own story with a ton of backstory and explanations that ruins the momentum. It felt like a lot happens but also doesn't happen in this book. A simple conversation might take pages to complete because it's interspersed with so much information.
There's a ton of action, don't get me wrong, and there's a lot of death and violence. A bit too much to the point where I felt like a lot of killings were just there for the shock factor and it all began to feel a bit meaningless after a while. It certainly felt that way to the students in the book, where people die around them like flies and they don't even blink an eye, so why should I? It also felt like such a weird world that probably wouldn't really work. How on earth are people supposed to work on essays and attend classes when they are looking over their shoulders literally every second of the day trying to make sure they don't get eaten up or killed by the next monster, and can't get a night's rest unless they have enough magic to charge up a ward around their beds/rooms? And even more so the student next door might be the ones murdering them? It sounds cool but I couldn't suspend my disbelief that far.
I took a break from this one to read another book which was more depressing and I wasn't a huge fan of (Wuthering Heights), but when I finished it and came back to this, I actually found myself less engaged here. By the end of the book, I was kinda skimming because I just wanted to get the book over and done with so I can tick it off my TBR. I didn't particularly care for any of the characters, and certainly not the main character even though we spend a lot of time with her and knowing her backstory.
It's a shame because I've read and enjoyed Uprooted and Spinning Silver also by Novik, and this one had a super intriguing premise but I just couldn't really get into it.
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, lesson one: block off a large block of time when starting this series because you will not want to put it down. Damn, getting sleep and bathing, hell, even food is optional. This book is excellent will grasp you around the neck and hold you tight.
“READER, I RAN the fuck away.”
First off, let me set the scene. The first book of the trilogy, A Deadly Education, introduces us to our protagonist Galadriel and the school called Scholomance. Galadriel's character reminds me of if I took Harry Potter and made the exact opposite of him in every way. If I constantly put him in dangerous situations, and Hogwarts was continually trying to feed him to fluffy the three-headed dog, it would be Galadriel. The only similarity between them is at both of their cores; they have good hearts. But in Galadriel's case, her heart is slightly darker and has terrifying magic and great snark armor.
Scholomance is the wizarding school that Galadriel goes to. The survival rate for Scholomance is around 50%. You do not fail out; you are blown to bits, eaten, have your skin flayed off in strips, or suffer irreparable psychological damage. To graduate, you must run the gauntlet through an obstacle course of creatures from hell all bent on devouring your mind, body, and soul. Surviving Scholomance is just as much about luck and social station as it is skill.
“I love having existential crises at bedtime, it's so restful.”
Imagine being a kid; maybe you are a bit shy or gawky. Perhaps you come from humble beginnings. Now imagine that your ability to survive Scholomance is almost certainly on your family's wealth or your power to be a suck-up. If you aren't good enough at it, you will probably get eaten by the demons that roam the sacred halls. In Galadriel's case, everyone hates her or is unnerved by her. They know something is off, dark queen vibes. What they don't know is that Galadriel has an immense amount of power. The kind that flattens cities and makes people slaves. Except that all she wants to be is left alone and not hurt anyone. How does she survive her junior year without hurting anyone and not being eaten alive by the evils that roam the halls?
It has been a long time since I read something as engaging as this story. I adored El, her snark, and her heart. She wants people to leave her alone, and short of yelling at them to “get off my lawn,” people won't leave her be. And things keep getting more complicated. There is a boy who is a confusion to her. People start gravitating towards her and maybe want to be friends. What is this friend nonsense?
Novik did an excellent job in crafting the characters and the school. You want to know them; there is enough teenageness to believe they are young adults grappling with hormones and who they are. But enough realism that they understand that the school and the demon-like creatures will eat them.
Pick up this book and get sucked in.
Yes, it is YA but there is a certain bite to it that recalls Gideon the Ninth and that gives it more depth than i could have hoped for.
I gave this another try. Someone online basically screamed at me for disliking this and wrote whole essays about why it's literally the most intelligent and best book EVAH.
Which... it isn't. But now I will wrote a slightly longer, proper review. So there we go.
Magical kids attract monsters. Their semi-controlled energy is a feast and they can't put up a fight equal to a fully trained magical adult. So the kids get sent to the Scholomance, a school where kids are locked up for 4 whole years, where survival is the hardest. Food gets poisoned, monsters lurk, you can't even go to the bathroom without looking over your shoulder.
Galadriel, aka El is... not popular. She is gloomy and weird and unfriendly, so she is not really allied to anyone, which is viatl in a hostile enviroment, until... a kid from an influential family, Orion Lake, suddenly starts following her around because he has a crush on her. After that, everyone suddenly cares about El.
I still feel what I felt during my first attempt; El is a bitch. She is rude to everyone, constantly judges, has issues with everyone. We have to root for her, because this is a YA book and she is a female main character, therefore her toxic behaviour is not only accepted, but glorified. She had a bad childhood! A huge part of it is because of her annoying, tree-hugging hippy mother, who is super powerful in healing, but is just too much of a spineless granola to actually DO THINGS to make her child not absolutely miserable. There are always excuses, because wizard groups called enclaves are douchey, and also she doesn't charge money for her skills, and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
It's just shitty parenting.
But all in all, El becomes an asshole. She meets Orion, this heroic, but socially inept boy... and she goes on abusing him. She calls him names, yells at him, lets him know she fucking hates his existence.
Then she also does the same with the people who try to “suck up to him”. The whole thing is excused with “well, it's better because you just want to use him and I don't, I treat him like everyone else”. This annoys me so much.
PSA for everyone reading: just because people treat you weirdly doesn't mean you have to accept constant verbal abuse and making you feel like you're a burden from someone else. NO, that is absolutely abuser behaviour.
Some things are fun about this. A bunch of the stuff going on at school can be interesting, but at the same time... why? Magic exists and people don't even really try protecting their kids, they just send them to a murder factory? Yes, the book tries to explain it away, but danger to their kids is literally one of the biggest things that motivates people.
It's just all too convenient for making it cool and edgy and violent. The whacky things didn't seem to have a good enough reason. You get some, sure, just not strong enough ones to not make me doubt the whole thing.
I did enjoy Orion Lake (stupidest, most Wattpad name ever), he was determined and he did so much good, while being a social zero. It just saddens me he is so stuck to someone who absolutely does not treat him right. It's the gender-swapped version of “he is a dickhead, but it's just because he had a hard childhood, love will change him”.
If Novik plays this straight, or just blames it on conveniently inconvenient magic, I will scream.
All in all, superficially cool idea get bogged down by unpleasantness and “yeah right” edgetastic explanations and rules. It's extremely sellable to a target audience that feels asshole young women are STRONG and INDEPENDENT. It works if you think not treating others like maggots is just internalised patriarchy or whatever.
I will go on with the series to see what half-baked excuse will explain away all this, but... yeah. This is yet another unpleasant YA read.
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This did not work for me whatsoever. When I say it's basically needlessly edgy Mean Girls and annoying high school drama it probably explains it all.
The protagonist is yet another asshole teenage girl we are supposed to think is all that and so witty, but to me she came off as a bad person. Of course she gets the attention of this super influential and important, rich, connected guy and what does she do? Constantly acts like the biggest bitch to him, which he takes like he enjoys being kicked around.
It was very juvenile, very annoying, very unpleasant.
I'm surprised to give this book 5 stars. On reflection, I don't know that the craft of it is excellent, nor was the plot particularly interesting or filled with varying points. That said, I was truly brought into the universe—or at least fascinated by it. I cared about the main Character, similar in my mind to Quentin at the beginning of the magicians. I enjoyed the world that was built.
I consumed this book extremely quickly by my standards and found myself really enjoying it, but I really and honestly can't say why. Maybe I just enjoy magical school settings and surly main characters? Anyway, I'll probably recommend this to you.