Novik is a white writer it’s fair that she was hesitant to attempt writing about things she’s never had to face. And this very concept, that people are too busy surviving to care much about prejudices, also apparently leads to carelessness when it comes to cultural insensitivity. Lack of descriptions are frustrating enough, but it seems too much to sincerely expect these magical people magically also got rid of their prejudices except for those related to mana usage and enclave membership. Names give the reader a sense of each character’s nationality, and in some cases, El offers the enclave those characters are from, hinting at but never explaining or describing any characters’ actual appearances. If everyone is fighting for their lives, then no one will have time to worry about standing prejudices or anything like that, right? And this sort of color-blind approach can pretty much be seen throughout the novel.

I think where Novik stumbled was in her approach to the school. (I did a pretty thorough, albeit spoiler-filled, story-beat study for this book a few weeks ago, if interested.) It definitely has the potential to pull at your heartstrings. Knowing so much about the world lent credence to character motivations and to the novel’s stakes, so that if you’re able to stick with the story until the end, it packs a much heftier punch because of it. They rarely felt unnatural, the inserts of information, but they did slow the pace down considerably. El is an incredibly smart character, and that is shown through consistent swaths of info-dumping. El and all of the major named characters felt three-dimensional, dripping with life. The review: While its commentary on race was a little tactless (we’ll get to that in a minute), its portrayal of isolation, of characters with strict morals put in impossible situations, and of self-sabotage created a mesmerizing, empowering narrative about a girl who refuses to be evil despite everyone and everything, even her own magic, gives her an excuse to slip to the dark side. But when fellow student Orion Lake saves her life ( again), El finds she’s going to have some choices to make, many of which will impact her chances for survival. El, an incredibly powerful sorceress with magic inclined towards razing cities to the ground, wants nothing more than to just get through school alive. A synopsis: Being a magically-inclined teenager is dangerous business, and the only way to have half a chance is to get into the Scholomance, a great, big, magical school full of things that are also trying to kill you.

A deadly education reviews