Previous book here.
It's senior year in the Scholomance, and how do I sum this up? Well, I'm going to go a bit beyond my usual "I try not to spoil beyond the first half of the book," but for reasons, because I have to discuss the themes of this. What happens is that El makes friends, and makes plans to get out for graduation, and then comes to the quite reasonable conclusion to her that she can get everyone out if they all band together. At first "everyone" is just her friends, then the senior class, and then literally the entire population of the school. And she figures out that the Scholomance itself hates that it's been doing such a poor job of protecting the students that it's supposed to be protecting, even the building itself wants to help.
HOW COOL IS THAT OF A PREMISE, EH? I love it so. It makes me want to post heart emojis.
I continue to enjoy El's friends, and how they deal with her without being fazed by her natural cranky. I enjoy how El is shocked when she sees someone save someone else, or when she gets the idea to put together a group healing and people do it, and how when she's weirdly stuck in a room with freshmen for a semester, she basically adopts them against her own will. I enjoy that she gets an adorable smart mouse familiar that ends up being dubbed "Precious" even though El hates that sort of thing. It's all very sweet. As for Orion and the sorta-budding relationship between him and El, it does eventually, ah pick up more in an adorable way. I love the descriptions of their making out, I must say. I also like how El starts thinking of ideas as to what to do once she's out of the Scholomance, assuming she survives it and all. I won't get into that too much since clearly that'll be book three (if you look up the title of book 3, that's what she's going for), but that sounds really cool.
If there's anything I sorta don't like, it's that the overall book execution can be hard for me to follow. Like there's constant spontaneous mal eruptions or whatever in between scheming and academics and it all feels a bit run-on and hard for me to follow at times. It's exhausting--but then again, so is El's life.
The book ends on a sudden event/cliffhanger, which I'll discuss below the spoiler cut. I will say that I have faith on this, though. Four stars.
Quote Corner (all quotes El unless spelled out otherwise).
- "If you're wondering which of those two options I picked, then you must not know me, as pain and dismay were obviously my destination. I didn't even need to think about it."
- "It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to get only me, to the exclusion of literally everyone else....
- Aadhya to El: "I think that's like the third time you've asked to be ditched. You're like one of those puffer fish, the second anyone touches you a little wrong you go all bwoomp." I'm not gonna quote it all, but she also has a great rant about how Orion can't see or figure out people that aren't El and El thinks everyone should save total strangers, so they're perfect for one another.
- "They want someone who's going to cast death spells on their enemies. And if I gave them that, I wouldn't be me any more, so I might as well not go live in a bag of dicks."
- "Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form."
- "Artifice is fundamentally about giving the universe a long and complicated story complete with attractive props in order to coax it to accommodate your wishes. I'm really more about shouting the universe into compliance with mine."
- "But I'd been overwhelmed by an instant eclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him cleaning out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out."
- "If you haven't eaten anything but tasteless slop in years and suddenly someone offers you a slice of chocolate cake, so what if you don't especially like chocolate cake, if you were interested in food at all, you'd at least think it over before you said no thanks."
- "Mum always told me that you couldn't know what people would do in a crisis, but I'd thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner."
- Liesel: "It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead."
Spoiler space
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I do love that El finally said "hell with it, let's have sex" the night before graduation day. Both of them might not survive the day (which may very well have happened?), she wants to know what it's like, HELL WITH IT. Awwwww.
I do note that the book points out that while one can do magic to get rid of one's period, they can't get birth control spells to work or really smuggle any in, and given El's history of being conceived within the Scholomance (I presume that's why she's got the magic she does), so...yeah, she's totally pregnant now. I'm not normally a fan of teen pregnancy, but there's a few books that I've read that make it work (Magic or Madness, Impossible), and this will probably be one of them. I bet their kid has some crazy ass superpower.
I was wondering about the title when reading it: why isn't this "The Last Graduation" or "The Last Graduates?" I guess El (or Orion?) might count as the last graduate on their way out the door, so that might be it.
As for the cliffhanger: Orion can't resist the siren song (and need for) killing mals at the end, especially the worst of them. He tells El he loves her so much, and shoves her out the door....You know what? I have faith he'll somehow turn up again somehow. I'm not worried about it at all. Magic is weird, his magic is weird, he'll figure out a way to get back to her somehow. (Or never mind, I just looked at the blurb for book 3. Hahahahah.)
I really look forward to where this is going to go. El has friends all over the world now--can they get together again? Can golden enclaves be created?
Quote Corner, Spoiler Section:
- "If we could cut down the maleficaria population enough to give us odds of survival outside the school that were as good as oh, one in seven, most people wouldn't come to the school to get the one-in-four odds here. It's too horrible."
- "...we had a decent chance of getting the odds outside down to one in two, and they thought the effect would last for at least a couple of generations."
- "Why don't I just kill them all as they come in?" Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals. "Shut up, Lake," I said, having many doubts about his ability to kill a billion mals."
- Orion: "I could do the one thing I wanted and also be doing something right, all the time. I wasn't just weird and creepy. I got to be--a hero."
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