Review: A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik

[Russ Allbery]

A Deadly Education
by Naomi Novik

Series:    The Scholomance #1
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 2020
ISBN:      0-593-12849-4
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     319

Some children are born with magic, which grows as they mature. Magic
attracts maleficaria: extremely deadly magical beasts that want to
feast on that magic. Having innate magical ability is therefore a
recipe for endless attacks from monsters and a death at a young age.
This was true even for the enclaves, which are the rich, gated
communities of the magical world.

Hence, the Scholomance. This is a boarding school for magic users
placed in the Void and protected against maleficaria as completely as
possible while still letting the students graduate and leave after
their senior year. Students are sent there via a teleportation spell
with a weight allowance, taught magic by automated systems and magical
artifacts, and left on their own to make alliances and survive. Or not
survive; protected as well as possible still means that there are
maleficaria everywhere, sneaking past the wards of the graduation hall
and looking for snacks. The school sends cleansing fire through the
halls at certain times; the rest of the time, the students either learn
enough magic to defeat maleficaria themselves, form alliances with
those who can, or die to feed the magic of the school.

Enter Galadriel, or El as she prefers. She's not an enclave kid; she's
the grumpy, misfit daughter of a hippie mother whose open-hearted
devotion to healing and giving away her abilities make her the opposite
of the jealously guarded power structures of the enclaves. El has no
resources other than what she can muster on her own. She also has her
mother's ethics, which means that although she has an innate talent for
malia, drawing magic from the death of other living things, she forces
herself to build her mana through rigorously ethical means. Like
push-ups. Or, worse, crochet.

At the start of the book, El is in her third year of four, and
significantly more of her classmates are alive than normally would be.
That's because of her classmate, Orion Lake, who has made a full-time
hobby of saving everyone from maleficaria. His unique magical ability
frees him from the constraints of mana or malia that everyone else is
subject to, and he uses that to be a hero, surrounded by adoring fans.
And El is thoroughly sick of it.

This book is so good in so many different ways that I don't know where
to start.

Obviously, A Deadly Education is a twist on the boarding school novel,
both the traditional and the magical kind. This is not a genre in which
I'm that well-read, but even with my lack of familiarity, I noticed so
many things Novik does to improve the genre tropes, starting with not
making the heroic character with the special powers the protagonist.
And getting rid of all the adults, which leaves way more space for rich
social dynamics between the kids (complex and interesting ones that are
entangled with the social dynamics outside of the school, not some
simplistic Lord of the Flies take). Going alone anywhere in the school
is dangerous, as is sitting at the bad tables in the cafeteria, so
social cliques become a matter of literal life and death. And the
students aren't just trying to survive; the ones who aren't part of
enclaves are jockeying for invitations or trying to build the power to
help their family and allies form their own.

El is the first-person narrator of the story and she's wonderful. She's
grumpy, cynical, and sarcastic, which is often good for first-person
narrators, but she also has a core of ethics from her mother, and from
her own decisions, that gives her so much depth. She is the type of
person who knows exactly how much an ethical choice will cost her and
how objectively stupid it is, and then will make it anyway out of sheer
stubbornness and refuse to take credit for it. I will happily read
books about characters like El until the end of time.

Her mother never appears in this book, and yet she's such a strong
presence because El's relationship with her matters, to both El and to
the book. El could not be more unlike her mother in both personality
and in magical focus, and she's exasperated by the sheer impracticality
of some of her mother's ideals. And yet there's a core of love and
understanding beneath that, a level at which El completely understands
her mother's goals, and El relies on it even when she doesn't realize
she's doing so. I don't think I've ever read a portrayal of a
mother-daughter relationship this good where one of the parties isn't
even present.

And I haven't even gotten to the world-building, and the level to which
Novik chases down and explores all the implications of this ridiculous
murder machine of a school.

I will offer this caveat: If you poke at the justification for creating
this school in the way it was built, it's going to teeter a lot. That
society thought this school was the best solution to its child
mortality problem is just something you have to roll with. But once you
accept that, the implications are handled so very well. The school is
an inhuman character in its own right, with exasperating rules that the
students learn and warn each other about. It tries to distract you with
rare spellbooks or artifact materials because it's trying to kill you.
The language tapes whisper horrific stories of your death. The back
wall of your room is a window to the Void, from which you can demand
spellbooks. You'll even get them in languages that you understand, for
a generous definition of understand that may have involved glancing at
one page of text, so be careful not to do that! The school replaces all
of the adult teachers in the typical boarding school novel and is so
much more interesting than any of them because it adds the science
fiction thrill of setting as character.

The world-building does mean a lot of infodumping, so be prepared for
that. El likes to explain things, tell stories, and over-analyze her
life, and reading this book is a bit like reading the journal of a
teenage girl. For me, El's voice is so strong, authentic, stubborn, and
sarcastically funny that I scarcely noticed the digressions into
background material.

And the relationships! Some of the turns will be predictable, since of
course El's stubborn ethics will be (eventually) rewarded by the story,
but the dynamic that develops between El and Orion is something
special. It takes a lot to make me have sympathy with the chosen one
boy hero, but Novik pulls it off without ever losing sight of the
dynamics of class and privilege that are also in play. And the
friendships El develops almost accidentally by being stubbornly herself
are just wonderful, and the way she navigates them made me respect her
even more.

The one negative thing I will say about this book is that I don't think
Novik quite nailed the climax. Some of this is probably because this is
the first book of a series and Novik wanted to hold some social
developments in reserve, but I thought El got a bit sidelined and ended
up along for the ride in an action-movie sequence. Still, it's a minor
quibble, and it's clear from the very end of the book that El is going
to get more attention and end up in a different social position in the
next book.

This was a wholly engrossing and enjoyable story with a satisfying
climax and only the barb of a cliffhanger in the very last line. It's
the best SFF novel published in 2020 that I've read so far (yes, even
better than Network Effect. Highly recommended, and I hope it gets
award recognition this year.

Followed by The Last Graduate (not yet published at the time of this
review).

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-01-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-12849-4.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>