The Golden Enclaves

The Golden Enclaves (Scholomance 3) by Naomi Novik

This trilogy is “Dark Harry Potter.” Think of Hogwarts with an 70% mortality rate and the main character is more adept with spells that wipe out cities than with cleaning rooms.

But it is sweet.

The first book introduced us to the Scholomance, the school in the void that the magical class ensconces their children in to give them better odds of survival than the real world. The problem is that the Scholomance is infested with the evil product of magic - malia - that lives off the tender and weak lives of young magicians. We were also introduced to Elle, a young witch who seems destined to become the destroyer of the world. We see Elle develop into a player in her class. She meets Orion, a true blue hero, and makes friends.

In the second book, Elle and her friends hatch a plot to save the entire class while ridding the world of malia.

The third book picks up immediately after the closing of the second book, with Elle in the real world but Orion has chosen to remain in the Scholomance to face certain doom. Elle, of course, takes up a plan to return to the Scholomance and kill the malia that she is certain is consuming the essence of Orion.

In this book, we follow Elle as she becomes a player in the politics of the Enclaves that exist half-in/half-out of the void. She meets Orion's parents and discovers a disturbing truth about Orion's mother. She learns something about how malia are created, particularly the vicious maw-mouth, and she learns something disturbing about Orion. Elle learns to fight and destroy maw-mouths. Enclaves are destroyed. War between Enclaves is breaking out. And it all rests on Elle's shoulders to sort out.

Elle comes across as a resourceful hero. Elle is a bit of a Mary Sue in that she always seems to have the right spell at the right time. We do learn that the universe has been set up in a way to create a path for Elle.

A distraction was that Elle's principal emotional setting is “angry.” She's a teenage girl who swings from being angry at everyone for not knowing something she discovered to sulking about her hurt feelings and then back to angry. Novik is not big on emotional nuance, but, then, she certainly knows teenage girls.

All in all, this is a fun, fast-moving book with some big ideas. It is a YA book, but that doesn't mean that it isn't enjoyable reading for older folks looking for some escapism.