A Deadly Education

A Deadly Education: A Novel (The Scholomance Book 1) by Naomi Novik

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There are problems with this story, but I found it to be so thoroughly enjoyable and novel that I willing to be flexible with my “willing suspension of disbelief” meter not to mark this book down on those problems.

This is a dark, dark YA urban fantasy. In this world, there are magic users hidden in the world. The elite of this group lives in “enclaves” in various cities. These enclaves appear to be fortress-like structures where wizards band together to mutually protect themselves from “maleficaria” or “mals.” Mals are evil bits of wizardry alchemically or artificially produced to become autonomous and filled with a need to eat wizards for the magical power, aka “mana,” they possess.

Mals particularly like younger wizards. In the external world, 19 out of 20 wizardly children never make it to adulthood because of mal attacks. Wizard society, therefore, developed the “Scholomance” which is an educational facility built-in “the Void,” separated from the world. Wizards send their children to this facility at age 14. They stay there until they graduate four years later. There are no adults at the Scholoamance. Instead, the Scholomance doles out lesson plans and food and provides negative motivations for failure to study.

It's a weird system with no mentors, no models of behavior, and no going outside.

There are mals, though, since they can get in through the gates where the Seniors graduate. Fortunately, the protective nature of the Scholomance ups the survival rate of the young from 5% to roughly 25%.

The main character is Galadriel (“El”). The school has decided that she has an affinity for death and destruction and is therefore giving her lesson plans based on mass destruction and torture. She is a dark person but has an uncorrupted core that doesn't want to be a dark wizard. When the chips are down, she's personally courageous and self-sacrificing, but no one knows it because the school seems to want to deny her the satisfaction of being known as a good person.

There is a Harry Potter figure in the story, who is Galadriel's foil. This is Orion Lake, who is authentic hero material. Orion rushes around destroying Mals and saving the lives of his classmates. Unfortunately, this has starved the Mals, making the ones waiting for the graduating seniors in the graduation hall more fearsome, suggesting that an epic wipe-out waits for the seniors.

The story starts with El as an unknown loser junior being saved to her disgust by Orion, again. El knows that she is powerful and she knows that she has to earn a reputation as powerful if she hopes to form a graduation alliance to get past the horrific mals waiting for her class the year after next. Orion's heroism wrecks her plan and she lets Orion know that he is not welcome. Orion, naturally for what is effectively a kind of romance, finds her caustic character to be fetching. The story follows the two of them through the rest of the school year and the trials and tribulations of the Scholomance. Orion and El are not “item,” although they are thought of that way by others.

The book is exciting and adventurous and thoroughly acquaints the reader with this interesting magical world. A drawback is that a lot of this development is through El's introspective reflections. She's kind of “b*tchy,” but, then, she has reasons to be that way. I might have taken a star off for this, but I thought the rest of the story compensated.

I found two things interesting. First, is the class war aspect of the story. The Enclaves have the power, even in the Scholomance. Outside the Enclaves, life is hard. Non-enclave children were allowed into the Scholomance to provide the Enclave children with cannon fodders and servants.

Second, the Scholomance environment manages to create a student body of Slytherins. Some young wizards gain power by murdering their classmates; others get better rooms by murdering their classmates. Sometimes the obvious thing for seniors to do is to break down a wall so that the Mals in the Graduation Hall can break into the Scholomance and murder the freshmen. That way the really fearsome Mals will be otherwise occupied while the Seniors make their dash for graduation.

This is not Hogwarts.