A Deadly Education ♥ Naomi Novik ♥ Scholomance #1

Published September 2020 ♥ Published by Del Rey Books

A Deadly Education Review

I wish I had gone to the Scholomance.

Instead, I went to an all-girls high school run by nuns. Woe is me.

Deadly Education was an absolute delight to read. Naomi Novik’s Scholomance was clever, imaginative and fatal. Literally. The Scholomance is a school for the magically gifted, with monsters lurking around every corner, hunting for students to eat. The school has been built into the void to help protect the students, but the monsters come anyway. The scent of young magic is too strong of a hold on them.

Hogwarts of Nightmares.

In many ways, The Scholomance is just a darker, deadlier version of the now-famous fictional school Hogwarts. You won’t find any teachers or support staff at The Scholomance to keep you safe, though, and the only way out is death or Graduation. Instead, you need to create alliances, trade, and connect with your fellow students to survive.

Novik’s story follows sophomore student El as she deals with the horrors of The Scholomance.

El has the pleasure of being “low hanging fruit” at The Scholomance. She has no friends, no alliances, and no one likes her. El grew up in a Yurt with her mother on a commune, far away from enclaves and other wizards. Her mother is a free-spirit & powerful healer, an independent wizard whom people love and adore. El is the complete opposite of her mother, with an affinity for destruction.

Left unchecked, El could destroy the world.

Orion Lake is a monster killing machine, and our dear El is pissed. In Lake’s heroic behaviour, he’s saved her life and hundreds of other students. El isn’t the only one pissed, though. The monsters haven’t been eating, and now they are starving. With too many starving monsters at the gates of The Scholomance making their way through the halls, everyone is upset.

Throughout all the horrors of The Scholomance, El finally starts to make some real connections. Finally, letting down her guard enough for people to get to know who she is—a funny, intelligent and caring person despite the rock-hard exterior. I loved reading as she built relationships with her chosen friends. I laughed and smiled and felt for El.

With a prophecy of death hanging over her head and a warning from her mother, I can’t wait to find out how El survives her Senior Year. If she survives her Senior Year, and if she can make it through the gates of The Scholomance back to the real world.

Darling Jack’s already stealing life force from human beings, so he’s going to start rotting on the inside within the first five years after he graduates.

… I was a burdened soul and would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world if I wasn’t stopped.

Orion’s life force came away from his spirit as easily as a fish on a line, being tugged out of the water.

Breakfast isn’t half as dangerous as dinner, but it’s still never good to walk alone.

…as befits the terrible dark sorceress I’m meant to be, at least until I presumably collapse into a grotesque crone.

My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning, and stays a long time.

The maw-mouth would stretch itself out along the hall, blocking as many doors as it could reach, and then it would start poking tendrils inside to pull the tender oysters out of their shells.

I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted for them to live.

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