Book Review : A Deadly Education By Naomi Novik

ABOUT THE BOOK:

A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets. There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere. El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem ? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.

REVIEW BY DANIA:

The basic premise of this book is simple: a school called the Schoolomance exists which was supposed to be a sanctuary for young wizards. This school was important since creatures called ‘maleficiers’ or mals would threaten their lives. But, something went wrong with the mechanism that would keep these ‘mals’ out and now, on graduation day, all seniors fight each other to survive as they are placed in a room that contains deathly creatures. What we get to know from the book is that enclavers are people who are part of enclaves or groups of wizards that came together to make a sort of sanctuary for wizards. These enclaves are highly prestigious and very hard to get into. On the other side of the spectrum are indie wizards who are not part of enclaves. When all of these wizards are placed into a school, that they have to fight to get out of alive, it is evident that indie wizards would suck up to enclavers since enclavers have tools and the power to get them out. El is an indie wizard who is treated as an outsider since she doesn’t exactly fit in and doesn’t suck up to encavers.
I understand El’s sentiments, but I was extremely outraged at how she treated Chloe in the last half of the book. I liked that Chloe called her out, which kind of put things into perspective.
El never really saw the other side of the story. She immediately thought that all enclavers never had to fight for anything in their entire life. But here was Chloe, a girl whose family was nowhere near the top of the enclave, and her relatives were indie wizards like El, who had later gotten accepted into the New York Enclave. That was the reason why I didn’t like El that much. El became high and mighty just because she thought that she had the moral high ground. That is why I liked Aadhya. Aadhya called out El whenever she was acting high and mighty. Apart from this thorn in my side, I liked the book and its world building a lot. The cliffhanger is absolutely jaw dropping. I give this book 3.5 stars

OTHER INFORMATION: None

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Certain readers accused the book of being racist, death (not graphic), violence (graphic), graphic descriptions of blood.