A Deadly Education - Textual Relations November 2021 Reading

[Falselogic]

A Deadly Education is a 2020 fantasy dark academia novel following Galadriel "El" Higgins, a half-Welsh, half-Indian sorceress, who must survive to graduation while controlling her destructive abilities at the fabled school of black magic, the Scholomance. It was published by Del Rey on September 29, 2020 and is the first of The Scholomance trilogy. The sequel The Last Graduate was released on September 28, 2021.

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About the Author: Naomi Novik is an American author of speculative fiction. She is best known for the Temeraire series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, and the standalone fantasy novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which were inspired by Polish folklore and the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, respectively. Novik has won many awards for her work, including the Alex, Audie, British Fantasy, Locus, Mythopoeic and Nebula Awards

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[Olli]

I read this a while ago! It's very good and I'm eagerly awaiting book two.

 

[Falselogic]

Just started this and I'm already irked with the protagonist. I'm real, real tired of grumpy angry I hate everyone teen protagonists.

 

[Egarwaen]

El’s not exactly the most original character ever, but I love the way she describes things. Her viewpoint makes Scholomance and the rest of the cast very memorable.

 

[John]

I've been trying to devote time to read this, but it just hasn't grabbed me yet. I'm still on the second chapter after a week. It's well written, I like the somewhat high arcane language mixed with the very common low speech that El has. I just haven't had the drive to move the page forward.

 

[Falselogic]

It was a slow start for me as well. The pace does pick up a bit though after the first couple of chapters or so.

 

[Egarwaen]

Finished my re-read!

Spoiler: Themes and such

One of the things that stood out to me was how much of a role intention plays; particularly mismatch between intention and effect. El's very adamant that the essence of magic is intention. Right away, we've got the mismatch between Orion's intention (save people) and the effect on El (I want to kill Orion Lake). El's intention leads to her winding up being Lake's only friend, and things spiral out of control from there. Skipping all the way up to the big picture, El says something towards the end along the lines of "Scholomance is hell but it was built by a group of some of the most genius wizards who ever lived to try to protect their kids, only it all went wrong". And I think that's really important for understanding how the theme of intention fits into the story. Wizards naturally tend towards magical thinking. It is, after all, how their magic works. But just like mundane humans, wizards aren't great at introspection about their intentions.

The genius wizards who constructed the Scholomance intended to keep their children safe, but also wanted to keep their secluded magical enclaves and the power and prestige they gather from those. To do that they threw their kids into a prison for five years, intending to be clever and dedicated enough to build that prison for the kids to be safer than they'd be outside. Of course, they were neither clever nor dedicated enough, so the effect was, instead, "acceptable mortality". El even outlines another effective strategy in one of her monologues - have mundane humans around! Do small, excusable magic instead of constructing a grand city in the void with impossible monorails! And let the mundane humans turn unkillable abominations into quite killable pests.

Maybe the intentions of the builders of Scholomance weren't quite what they thought they were...

EDIT: in terms of pacing things pick up a lot once Aadhya starts showing up regularly. By that point you're past most of the groundwork and onto the meat of the first arc.

 

[John]

I'm a quarter into the book, and really liking it now. It reminds me of an Interactive Fiction game I played recently called Hadean Lands, where you start in media res on an Alchemical Starship, and have to figure out how everything works via arcane language and clues. Want to clean a mirror, best figure out the cleaning ritual, which scents should be in the air, which specific incantation to chant, etc. Same here, El dribbles out the backstory as you go, which is much more interesting than just a lore dump before anything happens. In the beginning I do have a bit of a Hunger Games feel to the two main characters, just that one's a bit angrier than Katniss was.

 

[Violentvixen]

The first chapter was rough for me. I thought the writing quality was very poor, rather than showing me the world it's as if El was reading her own Wikipedia page. I'm on Chapter 6 now and it's improved at least.

Just started this and I'm already irked with the protagonist. I'm real, real tired of grumpy angry I hate everyone teen protagonists.

Yeah, very much so.

Oh and can someone parse this sentence for me? I've read it a bunch and can't make sense of it and neither can my spouse:

After hearing my story, they could all guess that I needed to go down, and we're all alive to the main chance in here.

From context I think it's just saying everyone already knew she needed to repair her door, but that last clause is baffling. It's in the first paragraph of Ch 2 (p24) if that helps.

 

[John]

Oh and can someone parse this sentence for me? I've read it a bunch and can't make sense of it and neither can my spouse:

have an eye to/for the main chance

1. Someone who has an eye to/for the main chance is always ready to use a…

dictionary.cambridge.org

I wasn't familiar with this phrase, but got the context like you did. Looks like it's a British idiom, which makes sense since Galadriel spent a lot of time in Wales.

I'm on Chapter 12 now, and I've liked it a lot after its slow start. It's still in the YA genre, definitely appealing to a 14 year old who thinks they're older than they actually are. Lord of the Flies with additional teenage angst, with more savior complexes added in for good measure. I quite liked a scene (spoilers for somewhere in the middle chapters, don't remember where) when El was thinking back to when she was in the yurt, maybe when her mom was at the hospital and she had to fight a monster on her own, and the descriptions seamlessly melded between her flashback and the current situation, maybe sitting at a cafeteria table stewing about something. It added a bit of prose to what's a pretty straightforward teenage school survival story (usually surviving high school is less literal, which is the point Novik is making).

 

[John]

I finished this today, a nice solid Teen novel. El has some good growth, but she's still an extremely selfish brat, just less so by the end. Nice solid twist feeding into the sequel bait, which I'll put on my list once some time passes.

I read some reviews which mentioned some problematic sections, when El was discussing dreadlocks that was perceived as racist. It wasn't in my digital copy, so it must have been removed afterwards. I can see trying to write for other cultures being a particularly dicey proposal, and I didn't think El's Indian side came out that much (but she didn't get much support from that side of her family, obviously).

I liked that both Orion and El were Saviors, just with different goals. Orion single-mindedly kills Mals because it's in his nature; his special talents give him an immediate mana boost, but he's not saving people for the love of it. He just doesn't know of anything else to do with himself, and can't not do it.

El's trying to evade her prophecy and lineage, but ends up saving just as many people on her path. She says she's just doing it for survival, but it doesn't really track. She's talked about how for years she's been fantasizing her "coming out", showing everyone her power as a way to move up, and to further her original plans of joining an enclave. Being in the scholomance, she ends up realizing that the enclaves are what's driving their society to ruin, but her acts and politicking ultimately save the lives of the same institutional reputations that she perceives as keeping her in a lower caste.

If this is taking the Hunger Games approach which it's modeled after, I see Book 2 showing how El graduates, continuing to use the system while being beset by horrors the whole time. Book 3 would show her dismantling everything, tearing down the enclaves, the Scholomance, et al, fulfilling the prophecy that her mirror showed her while issuing a new age for sorcerers. If there was a Book 4, it could be a coda showing why tearing down society was Bad, Actually, and she ends up revolting against the new reality that she worked to bring to life.

 

[Egarwaen]

I will say Book 2 is probably going to surprise you.

 

[Violentvixen]

have an eye to/for the main chance

1. Someone who has an eye to/for the main chance is always ready to use a…

dictionary.cambridge.org

I wasn't familiar with this phrase, but got the context like you did. Looks like it's a British idiom, which makes sense since Galadriel spent a lot of time in Wales.

Ah, thank you! That makes more sense.

I read some reviews which mentioned some problematic sections, when El was discussing dreadlocks that was perceived as racist. It wasn't in my digital copy, so it must have been removed afterwards. I can see trying to write for other cultures being a particularly dicey proposal, and I didn't think El's Indian side came out that much (but she didn't get much support from that side of her family, obviously).

Agreed that I wish we had seen more Indian representation. But some of the complaints I saw about this book were offensive and hurtful as they were making some really shitty assumptions/statements about biracial people and it saddened me. They tried to vilify the author/book and did so by saying some downright racist things in a few cases and it frustrates me that this could scare an author off from trying to have a biracial character in the future. I think this book did a very realistic portrayal of a biracial teenager who lost contact with one side of her family. Edit to clarify: I still think I would have found it more interesting lore-wise if she was in contact with both sides, considering some of the differences in magic that were hinted at between the different enclaves, but angry internet people have made me a bit reluctant to go into depth here.

Also the dreadlocks bit was in my copy, likely my library has an earlier edition. It was definitely an uncomfortable and unnecessary tangent.