pagesofjulia

Book two of the Scholomance series was every bit as thrilling and engaging as book one. I love our grumpy, standoffish teddy bear of a protagonist.

El had good character development in A Deadly Education; now she’s continuing to develop as a person, both because she’s a teenager (coming of age) and because she’s made friends for the first time in her life. She’s reluctant to believe in this, because she’s endured a lifetime of trauma at the hands of almost everyone she’s ever known. Her new friends and allies do have something to gain from working with her at graduation, now that her power as a wizard is becoming more widely known, so she’s not entirely wrong to consider that this may motivate their friendship; but the reader can see better than she can that their friendship is real, too. It’s poignant to see such a sweet but enormously curmudgeonly, damaged, dear kid struggle to accept that people might actually care about her.

The privileges of class and nationality at work here, the power structures that are most invisible to those in power, and the injustice of it all, are more overtly at the center of this book. I think there are some good magical parallels to our real world here that can be instructive but also entertaining and fit neatly into the fantastical wizard-y world of Novik’s imagination, which is prodigious, by the way; this is expert-level worldbuilding. Late in the book the focus begins to move beyond the Scholomance to consider the whole world, which is clearly where book three will take us; this one ends on another final-line cliffhanger (!), so I’ll be getting there fairly quickly.

Perhaps because they were both Liz recommendations, I am reminded of the Murderbot series here, which also featured an outsider first-person narrator who is actually a loveable marshmallow on the inside but puts forward a hard, aggressively antisocial exterior. Despite being mostly rejected by their respective societies, both are driven to right the big wrongs. I do love this set-up, and I love El for being a hard-nosed, sarcastic badass.

In this installment, I actually questioned the YA label. The series does star teenagers, and deal with coming-of-age problems (therefore YA). On the other hand, it also deals with some very dark themes, heavy enough that some readers move it out of the YA category; but after some consideration, I don’t think that’s necessarily a disqualifier. It’s definitely for older kids, not least because there’s some (non-graphic) sex in this one. Maybe the line between YA and adult is blurred; certainly it depends on the reader. There’s no question that these are books for adults (hi), but I think they’re also books for young adults who are up for serious thinking on dark subjects, and some really good writing. This is a step adultward from Hunger Games, which are however very fine books in their own right. Who’s to say what kids should read, anyway? My parents didn’t seem to me to monitor my reading much, and I definitely read some stuff beyond my comprehension at a young age, and all that seems to have done is whet my fire. As ever, your mileage may vary.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: children's/YA, coming of age, dystopia, fantasy, Liz, sci fi |