She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world.
The final book of Namoi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy picks up where Book 2 left off. Galadriel “El” Higgins, destined to be a force of destruction, has instead helped to save her fellow students, from the most terrified freshman to every well-connected graduate. The deadly school for magical children has been thrown into the void along with half of the world’s devouring malia, and El is now free from the Scholomance forever.
So of course the very first thing El does is try to get back in.
…the girl Orion loved wasn’t a gentle, kind healer, she was a sorceress of mass destruction who on two occasions had already managed to shred maw-mouths apart, and the stupid bloody fool could have tried trusting me to do it again.
When I say this book picks up where Book 2 left off, I mean right where it left off. El appears back in Wales, greeted by her mother who’s joyfully grateful her daughter survived a school that usually kills at least half of its students. But El can’t even enjoy seeing her beloved mother again because she’s desperate to pull Orion out of the school. Orion, the most annoying boy in the senior class (to El, anyway), and also her friend who’s just starting to be her lover, and right before turning to fight the biggest maw-mouth in creation he shoved her through the gateway and stayed behind.
Novik absolutely stomps on your heartstrings here, with El casting spell after spell, using every scrap of mana she had left, doing anything she can to try to return to the fight, to pull him out, to throw a shield between him and the monster that eats and then digests magicians, alive, forever. And none of it works. El is left screaming into a scrying pool made out of a puddle between tree roots, knowing that Orion is cut off from the world and a thousand times worse than dead.
People do like to pretend maw-mouth victims are dead, but that’s just because it’s unbearable to think about it otherwise.
El doesn’t even have a chance to start dealing with what’s probably going to be a lifetime of mourning for Orion before she’s dragged out of her mother’s peaceful commune and back into the world. Someone has been attacking Enclaves. Those magical strongholds – anchored in the void and protected from mals – are mysteriously being damaged or outright destroyed, wiping most of the people inside out of existence. And El with her talent for scaring the hell out of everyone and her determination to not be the source of death and destruction for enclaves seems to be the only person with enough power to do something about it.
I was the thing that maw-mouths ran away from in the dark.
The first two books took place almost entirely inside the Scholomance; here the setting expands outward as we finally get to see the rest of Novik’s wizarding world. El and her occasional (and possibly not always trustworthy) companions literally jet-set around the world, sometimes just ahead of the next disaster. The way the different enclaves are described make you realize why so many people will mortgage away years of their lives in order to live, or even just work, inside one. It’s not just the safety factor, it’s how beautiful each of them are: London with its twisting paths of fairy tale gardens. New York’s famous gateways (which will be familiar to some. If you’re a New Yorker then you probably ought to know one of your grand old railway stations wasn’t demolished, it was stolen). We get more details about how everything is hidden from view from the mundanes, and how the spaces inside the enclave can be borrowed from the outside(in Dubai extra living area can be brought in from the occasional empty office), or the secret ways to sneak inside using forgotten and outside-of-time spaces, as long as you don’t mind the potions you have to drink to do it.
It tasted like a light sea-green with streaks of polished brass and autumn leaves falling. If that doesn’t sound drinkable to you, my digestive system vigorously agreed.
El is dazzled by some of this and contemptuous of most of it. All she wants (other than, you know, to stop thousands of people from being murdered by a mysterious attacker) is to find the location of the last surviving door to the Scholomance, and the mana to enter it so she can kill the maw-mouth that ate Orion and put him out of his misery.
Unfortunately everything having to do with the enclaves is really complicated. There are alliances and mana-sharing arrangements, along with some nasty (though admittedly tasty) scandals and infighting. The basic history and backroom deals could be a little hard to follow sometimes (fortunately El’s interior narration explains everything as we get to it), but El keeps pushing through, trying to stop the attacks, to solve the puzzle of the Golden Enclaves so she can find a way to make enclaves that don’t depend on exploiting desperate families…
…and then we see the real history of the enclaves. And how they survive. And how they were created. It’s…it’s much worse than I imagined, a breathtakingly horrible method. And it’s even worse when you think of how many people had to be involved, and how absolutely true-to-life it is that people would make that choice, because if it’s their own children’s safety on the line, and if they could ensure that thousands of people would be safe, then of course people would think it be worth that cost. Any cost.
Even if the Scholomance hadn’t taught me better, my entire life was an object lesson in the dangers of not getting the price tag up front.
That theme comes up over and over again in this final installment: price. There’s a real danger to saying things like “I’d do anything for that”, not just because there’s always someone in power who’ll take you up on that, but because eventually you’ll find reasons to justify the unforgivable. El’s interior monologue is an almost constant argument with herself (sometimes going on for pages in the middle of a pitched battle) about what is or isn’t worth it, right down to maybe fulfilling her own destiny and just leveling whole enclaves in one night, or charging into the middle of the New York enclave and scream in the faces of Orion’s grieving parents for not giving him one ounce of self-preservation.
“He was an idiot who thought he had to be a hero instead of a human being, and that’s your fault, you sorry bastards, the whole lot of you.”
It’s hard to give a review of more than the first third of the book, because the entire story keeps opening up further and further. You’ll just have reached a revelation that in any other story would have been the entire point, and then another piece of information is revealed and there’s a disorientating moment when you realize the whole problem is even bigger than you thought, a gigantic poisonous system feeding on itself.
I’ve said this for a lot of the books I review, but I would really really love to see this series adapted into a movie series. Every book has had more beautiful images, more dazzling battle scenes, more heartwarming moments between El, and her fellow graduates, and her loyal mouse-familiar Precious. (I’ll give you this one for free: nothing bad happens to anyone’s mouse.) And the author sticks the landing in the best way, because what you realize about El’s destiny, her great-grandmother’s prophecy that ruined her life, is that it’s all true. The elements were all there from the beginning, and the story follows all its own rules, but it means the whole series can be re-read almost right away, because once you get the right viewpoint it changes everything.