This is a book I've been vaguely debating reading for a year. On the one hand, I like Naomi Novik books. On the other hand, the concept behind this one is depressing as fuck. I saw it in the library, I flicked open the first page, and the narrative voice was so compelling that I grabbed it.
The concept behind this book is that magically gifted people--apparently just young kids to especially teenagers though--are just walking bait for every single hungry magical monster roaming the world, of which there are MANY. Kids/teenagers are just literally constantly being eaten. And to quote the book, "the best solution that all the most powerful and brilliant wizards of the last century and more have been able to come up with," is to have all teenagers go to a magically automated high school of death, with no adults, no teachers, just magically automated learning for 4 years, while monsters are constantly attacking them. You seriously need a bodyguard just to take a shower. You can't have any contact with the outside world, more people die than survive, and "graduation" is trying to fight your way out of the school while all the monsters attack, and nobody's been able to fix the "scouring machinery" in the graduation hall for the entire existence of the school. And this is literally the best solution they have to keep as many teens alive as possible. Why is anyone having kids if this crap is going on?
So yeah, DEPRESSING AS FUCK CONCEPT OF HORRIBLE DEATH SCHOOL. To quote our narrator,
"For the last three years, I've had to think and plan and strategize how I'm going to survive every single meal in here, and I'm so tired of it, and I'm tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I've ever done. I've been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them."
Meet Galadriel "El" Higgins: her Welsh mother Gwen and her Indian father Arjun fell in love and got pregnant in the Scholomance, and he got eaten by a maw-mouth at graduation getting her out. Gwen is the biggest giant good happy hippie you ever heard of in your life...and in compensation, her daughter is prophesied to be a horrible murdering dark wizard and her father's family would have nothing to do with her after that. El loves her mother, but learned at age 9 that literally nobody in their hippie commune would lift a finger to save her life when she was being attacked. "People don't like me enough to help me even if I scream." And virtually nobody likes her, as she gives off bad vibes. And to be fair, El is justifiably Very Cranky about how her life is going. Her affinity is for being gifted with say, mass murder curses every time she just wants a spell to mop the floor. She's "strict mana" (not fueling herself with any life force) and actively trying to NOT GO EVIL. Trying very hard. The poor girl needs to be liked on some level because one can't survive alone, but it's extremely hard going.
At the beginning of the book, El is angry/snarky about the school hero, Orion Lake, saving her bacon. Orion basically is the Class Hero from Buffy, having saved hundreds of lives (to be fair, his power affinity helps with that sort of thing). He's from an enclave--enclaves being the safest way to live as a wizard, if you can get a group to take you--and he's famous and popular and whatnot. This is the sort of thing that makes El want to barf, even though she has secret plans to try to earn her way into an enclave circa senior year if she can just figure out the ah, likeability issue. However, as she gets to know the guy as a real person, she develops sympathy and friendship for him, given his issues. "He was living the same garbage story I was, only in mirror image." While this book really doesn't get very romantic, given the circumstances, you enjoy how El is all "I treat him like a normal person, why don't the rest of you try it?" to his enclave-mates. El also makes a few friends of her own during the book, which is great.
At the end (I note that El and company are in their junior year, so there's one more year/book to go in this duology), the seniors point out that Orion has saved too many lives over the course of his career--not only does the school not provide enough food for that many people to eat, it means the mals only get hungrier and therefore more seniors are likely to die, and they're resentful of this. This leads to a scheme of Orion, El, and various seniors trying to fix the scouring equipment in the graduation hall so less people die.
(I'm not entirely sure I understand all the technical details of the magic, scouring equipment, etc.to be honest.)
Anyway, this is disturbing and depressing but interesting? I like El. She's cranky AF and unpleasant but you root for her anyway, given what she's dealing with. Orion is an interesting situation as well. I liked El's eventual friends/allies that she makes, and even Chloe, a New York enclaver who starts out not liking El but finding hidden depths in her later, has potential.
And then there's the fact that El figures out how to take out a mal-mouth (the kind of creature that ate her dad) all by herself, and then continues to be utterly shaken and horrified that she managed it and realizes that's not something she can let get around. Maybe her powers for mass destruction could be used that way...?
We'll see in book 2, I guess. Four stars.
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