A Deadly Education

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.