I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.
Welcome to the Scholomance, high school for a few thousand budding magic-users. Also home to an uncounted number of deadly magical creatures (“mals”) lurking in cupboards, under desks, in the bathrooms, crawling through the air ducts, and slowly congregating in the Graduation Hall, ready to pounce on the senior students when the huge gears inside the core of the school migrate their floors down to the first level and they take their final exam, otherwise known as “getting out the door alive”.
A Deadly Education was rated one of the best books last year by Amazon, and I’m wishing now that I’d gotten around to reading it earlier, because this would have definitely made my list of favorite books of 2020.
You can forget any ideas about the Scholomance being a fanciful school for wizards, with packages from home and summer vacations with friends. Once you’re in, you’re there for the full four years, and the only communication from the outside comes from notes smuggled in with the freshman class. There’s no kindly or stern teachers on staff. In fact, there aren’t any teachers at all. There’s just the school, the assignments and spells that magically appear on your desk at class (or appear out of the terrifying void that takes up one wall of everyone’s dorm room), and the daily struggle to survive in a place that’s trying to kill you all the time.
The Scholomance is a terrifyingly, deliciously nasty place. Mals can hide anywhere; a trip to the supply room can feel like a suicide mission. Showers are only taken if you have someone to stand guard in the bathroom, the food in the cafeteria might be poisoned, or possibly alive and ready to bite. Even a pair of scissors can go bad if you’re not careful. And by “bad” I mean “will probably try to stab your eyes out.”
I loved all the ways the author created to make the school difficult, even malicious. The library changes shape if you don’t pay attention, plus the study carrels sometimes wander, and they’re always demon possessed and bad-tempered. You have to be very careful about what languages you look at for more than a few seconds, and while the school doesn’t care if you cheat, there are serious penalties for not getting your work done.
If you don’t complete a shop assignment on time, your unfinished work will animate on the due date and come after you with whatever power you put into it.
The author has created a system of magic that’s quite a bit more complicated than just pulling the power out of the air. Magic can come from mana (created by various ways, including crocheting, which just pleases me right down to the ground) or malia (harvested out of inanimate objects, or yanked out of living creatures, like fellow students, which is of course not recommended, het hem). There’s so much fascinating minutia of what goes into magic, such as how to treat a spellbook so you don’t make it mad, or the differences in casting that depend on whether it’s a spell that’s spoken, sung, or poured into a handmade item.
So why, even with everything to learn, would anyone choose to be locked inside a school where the survival rate for each year’s crop of students is usually around twenty-five percent? Mostly because mals and dark wizards (maleficers) feed off of mana, and someone who’s old enough to start showing magical affinity but too young to defend themselves is the tastiest source of mana around. For young magic-users, the Scholomance is the most dangerous place, other than literally everywhere else in the world.
By the end of the summer I turned fourteen, they were coming at a rate of five a night.
Narrating all of this is junior student Galadriel, known as El by her classmates (not her friends, she doesn’t have any). El is in the unique position of being the daughter of a witch who’s beloved for her unfailingly kind nature, while also being hated by, well, everyone. El has a unique curse (someone may call it “destiny”) and an affinity (magical specialty) that’s hard to describe, something to do with wholesale death and destruction. Everyone can sense it, most especially the school itself.
Just requesting a simple cleaning spell will result in the school eagerly giving El a book of spells that would let her slaughter an army or turn an entire village into a hoard of mind-controlled zombies. Even when casting something benign she has to be careful that it doesn’t turn into something that might let her TAKE OVER THE WORLD. It would almost be funny, except that she needs to be powerful in order to survive, but every sign of that power is confirmation that she’s the villain everyone thinks she’ll be. She can’t cheat, even a little, without running the risk of turning into something worse than the roving monsters that tried to prey on her since she was nine, and which will be after her again the second she graduates the Scholomance without a whole team of allies, or more helpfully a place in one of the many magical enclaves.
And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.
The only real hope for most people is to be good enough in the Scholomance to earn a place in an Enclave, where you didn’t have to worry about getting slaughtered by a mal every second of the day. Sometimes the back-and-forth jockeying for position and bargaining for a place at the table got a little too convoluted for me to follow, but it all starts to get drowned out by El’s growing realization that the system is hugely unfair. The wealthy and powerful hold onto that power by making sure all the hard work and danger goes to someone else, all the while making desperate people think that this could, if they’re very lucky, let them eventually become one of the wealthy and powerful themselves.
Except that most of them don’t survive long enough to find out what a lie it is from beginning to end. But really, if a fellow student gets sacrificed, can you really blame someone when they put more value on their own life than yours?
Well, yes, you can. You just can’t ever forget that you’re only a terrifying monster attack away from making the same choice.
Dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.
In addition to the desperate scramble for a scrap of power, there’s also the mundane cause-and-effect of relationships where you have to figure out if someone actually sees you, or just the things you can do for them. (You know, like every high school anywhere, ever.) El’s defense against everyone’s dislike is to be as angry and off-putting as possible; she’s the master of the bitter put-down, and there are several instances where she convinces someone to back off with a murderous glare. This technique is useless against class hero Orion, the paladin-like junior who’s completely blind to what life is like for the students that aren’t born to wealth and privilege, doesn’t seem to realize that his heroics are actually making things worse, and who insists on saving El’s life. Multiple times. It’s embarrassing.
Orion’s attention does have a side benefit (other than, you know, saving her life and all). The politics of rich enclaver kids, desperate hangers-on, and angry outcasts like El shifts dramatically when everyone thinks the golden-boy of the class has fallen for the probably-a-malificer girl that no one likes. And somehow in between El’s attempts to play this for profit and her stubborn refusal to accept any handout that’s based on a lie, El ends up with…actual friends.
This isn’t something twee, where someone has to learn that the real magical survival was the friends we made along the way. El already knew friendship was valuable, it’s just that she never thought she’d be allowed to have it. So we get to watch her discover what this means to her, having someone who, yes, will help her make it to graduation alive, but that it’s also something that leads to things like cozy late-night study sessions after raiding the vending machines that occasionally give out treats better than a WWI military ration.
There are so many amazing bits where I wanted to keep reading to see what happened, but I also wanted to save it for a time when I’m in a comfy chair late at night and can really savor it. I learned that Novik can paint some gorgeous images in her book Spinning Silver. She has the same flair here, but the style is definitely grittier, more cinematic than fairytale, with last-second magical shields being cast in Mandarin, a battle against a truly horrific monster who has the potential to never stop digesting you, and a group of unlikely allies working together as a team against a hoard of monsters inside a gargantuan, pleasingly steampunk mechanism.
And once again, Novik finishes a book with absolutely stunning final line, this one hitting with a POW! right between the eyes, and making me count the days until Book 2 comes out in June.