Deadly Education by Naomi Novik draws on the “magical school of magic” subgenre of fantasy (And then does terrifyingly eldritch things with it.) The magical school of magic in this setting is the “Scholomance.” The Scholomance is a magically automated school intended to protect its students from the monsters that would very much like to eat them–with variable success. That is, students still get eaten, but presumably fewer than would get eaten if the Scholomance didn’t exist.
In this setting, magic users are predated upon by various horrifying monsters, many of which were at some point created by those same magic users. The only protection against these monsters is to either live in warded pocket dimension “enclaves” or be surrounded by a buffer of ordinary nonmagic using people to disbelieve in the monsters.
Our Protagonist is a girl named Galadriel. (Something something and despair.) Our Girl is not the Heroine because she is fated to be a Villain, something she resents deeply and is fighting every step of the way. As you do when you were raised by a hippy spiritual healer in a pagan commune. After a fateful encounter with the monster-slaying hero of the school, Galadriel is plunged into the drama of Scholomance politics and alliances. This leads her to eventually acquire something resembling friends, (How is friendship formed? We just don’t know!) and the aforementioned alliances that are literally a matter of life and death when graduation comes around.
Deadly Education has some amazingly creepy world-building and monster design. Galadriel is an angry spiky burr of a character fighting fate and everyone else in range. (And she has a lot of range.) There’s an ongoing nature-vs-nurture theme going with Our Protagonist’s fate as a villain that I found really interesting. Galadriel is fated to be a villain. And she has some personality traits that would somewhat lend to her being a villain. That is, she has some anger issues and some innate tendencies to lash out.
But she was raised by a very kind and good woman who did her best to raise Galadriel with a concept of right and wrong. Unfortunately, Galadriel kind of exudes an aura of villainy, which means most people are very hostile toward her and in some cases actively try to kill her. Then you have the Scholomance, which is apparently trying to groom her into being a Supervillain because it keeps giving her Very Bad Villain Type Murder Spells.
This book has some great moments and lots of creepy scary moments. I absolutely recommend it.
Leave a comment