My darling girl, I love you, have courage, and keep far away from Orion Lake.
Book Two of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy starts right where Book One left off, with a note smuggled in by an incoming Freshman and delivered to Galadriel – “El” to her friends, which she’s eternally shocked she actually has now – who knows if there’s one thing that’s absolutely to be trusted, it’s her mother’s advice.
Which El is not planning to follow. She does this gritting her teeth, knowing full well that this is a really bad idea, but she has something going on with determined do-gooder Orion, and she’s not about to throw that away just because of a cryptic note, or because it might possibly bring about her destiny to cause doom and destruction to all the magical enclaves of the world.
Not that she needs the distraction of a teenage romance right now. El and her fellow Seniors only have one more year to graduation, when they all have to run out the Scholomance doors through a gauntlet of thousands of starving mals. A fifty percent survival rate would be a good year, and there’s plenty of ways Seniors can be slaughtered just by attending their morning class. What El and every other student knows is that you have to spend every moment you can gathering mana and focusing on your own survival. And if a mal attacks then your best bet is hope it kills someone else, because the mana you spend trying to save them may mean the difference between getting out the door at graduation and getting eaten.
So it would also be a really bad idea if El were to, say, save an entire roomful of Freshman for no good reason. Which she does, swearing at herself the entire time for being a total idiot. Who does she think she is, Orion Lake?
And then she does it again. And again. And then keeps on having to do it, over and over while the rest of the school enjoys a surprisingly mal-free semester, because for some reason the Scholomance itself seems to be very invested in El becoming what everyone seems to think she’s destined to be: a full-blown maleficer.
The school wanted me to have to make the first selfish choice, to save my own mana, instead of saving a random freshman I didn’t care about. Because then it would be easier for me to make the second selfish choice after that, and the one after that.
El is still the delightfully prickly and improbably powerful terror that she was in A Deadly Education. There are a couple of interesting new aspects of school life for her now though. She has an alliance, a group of actual friends to watch each other’s back in a fight, but also to have cozy study sessions with, to joke about who possibly has a crush on who, and to have the kind of trust where you can tell someone when they’re being a total bitch for no reason and it’s not helping, El.
All of it is making it easier for El to actually care about people, something she’d never allowed herself to do before. Novik masterfully creates these moments of affection and concern – between alliance members, between total strangers, between a student and a parent who had to try to send enough love to last them for four years – that just hit you right in the heart.
I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic.
Oh, and that other new aspect for El? She’s actually being considered as a candidate to join an enclave. New York has graciously decided El is powerful enough for a seat at the table, even more so than their golden boy Orion Lake. People who wouldn’t have minded if she’d gotten slaughtered last year (when they weren’t actively trying to make that happen) are now being nice to her, and it’s weird. El’s being offered something she’s dreamed of ever since she was a terrified nine-year-old being attacked by hungry mals every night.
And El has decided she wants nothing to do with any of them.
A lot of the book focuses on El’s total disdain for the enclaver kids. She can’t stand the idea of being useful to some rich bastards who are accustomed to being served by people so desperate they’ll risk throwing their lives away for just a chance at a spot in an enclave. She resents the hell out of people like that gifting her with exactly what she always wanted. More importantly, she has a totally impractical dream of a world where people wouldn’t have to crawl in supplication to the big established enclaves.
And then there’s Orion Lake, making all of this a lot more complicated. We get to learn a lot more about Orion’s backstory, and what makes him so uniquely qualified to be a killer of mals. And also why the New York enclave was so willing to either kill El last year rather than run the risk that Orion might actually leave with El. There’s a reason why the New York enclavers have so very much privilege in the school, and it’s all wrapped up with Orion, who they value as a priceless resource, not necessarily as an actual person.
And Orion doesn’t even have the good sense to be mad about it. His total lack of self-preservation is all wrapped up in something much more broken, the result of a kind of abuse that’s so subtle a lot of people wouldn’t believe it even counts as abuse at all. It’s one more reason for El to hate the New York enclave, and to be pissed off at herself for being pissed off at Orion, and even the efforts of El’s ornery and adorable familiar (a mouse named Precious) to make her stay away from Orion Lake aren’t terribly effective. It’s a will they/won’t they teenage romance that’s exactly as complicated as it is in real life; unsure and full of total conviction at the same time. Romance in the middle of magic.
And there’s one more character who deserves a look: the Scholomance itself. The school has some kind of symbiotic relationship with the students. Or the mals. Or the mana’s that’s released when the mals eat students it’s hard to say. And Orion’s relentless killing of mals to save students (now reluctantly being copied by El) has destroyed the balance. Weird things start happening (weirder than usual, I mean), and the Scholomance definitely has an agenda. It just…wasn’t actually the agenda I was expecting.
El has pretty much declared war on school in order to save the lives of her friends. And then the Senior class. And then the worst happens; she realizes that none of it is enough. When you get right down to it it’s the entire system that’s the problem, the one that has children signing up for a fifty percent chance of survival because they have a ninety-five chance of dying anywhere else. Trying to get the entire Senior class through graduation alive is just putting a bandaid on the problem.
And this is where things get really interesting, because Novik has created an impossible, unsolvable problem, and then sets about solving it.
“London has been thinking about it for a century, and New York nearly that long. Nothing we’ve found gets us better odds than the Scholomance.”
The second half of the term is practice for graduation, and it’s utterly relentless, a near death experience every time the students enter the gym (which is a horrible place but not always for the reasons you’re expecting.) Novik will have insanely complex ideas explained cinematically, with images of magic being used to swipe mals out of the air or morph the structure of the Scholomance itself. And the ways she tells the story would constantly catch me by surprise. Some events you only see in a flashback; El at one point remembers an incident that’s so truly horrifying in any other book it would probably get its own chapter. And yet even as something that’s told in a memory while El is preoccupied with something else, it’s still a startling “yikes” moment.
Novik mixes in a lot of wonderfully humorous moments in all this: a murder attempt ending with a sulky game of cards in someone else’s dormitory while the rest of the school is washed with fire, a hilarious scene with several tiny familiars running amok in one of the labs as everyone scrambles to get things back under control. There’s also so many tasty details about the mechanics of magic in this world, the methods for generating mana, or the design of the Scholomance itself. We spend some time on the pros and cons of going strict mana or taking the maleficer track, the risks of signing up to be a minion, the annoying reasons why good grades can be a bad thing, and all the wonderfully horrible ways the mals function, and hide, and kill students.
The planning for graduation is also endlessly fascinating, all the creative ways the students come up with to make magic do things no one had asked it to do before. And we finally get to see how exactly the Senor level (which starts at the top level during Freshman year and gradually drops down to the lowest level) resets itself back to the top, and how an entire class is herded into the graduation hall.
The last few came flying in panicked from the landing on the hissing crackle of the mortal flames going, with their shadows huge in front of them in the brilliant blue-white light.
Just like with the first book, I wanted to spend as much time lingering over this one as possible, saving up chapters to read late at night in a cozy chair. Right up until the last half of the last chapter and then it was more OMG ARE YOU KIDDING ME AAAAAA. It’s glorious and terrifying. I literally finished the last thirty pages in a panic, already knowing we were getting a cliffhanger but not knowing who was going to survive, and realizing like El did that finding people you really and truly care about is the most amazing thing ever, and also that it gives you so much more to lose.