This book review is going to be a two-for-one deal in part because it took me a while to get around to reading them. The grimdark with a tiny sliver of hopepunk that is Novik’s Scholomance Trilogy was a lot for me to take in, so I was slightly nervous about what was going to happen in The Last Graduate. (I am also extremely distractable and there were a lot of other shiny things that kept popping up.) It’s also a two-for-one deal because the end of The Last Graduate ends in such a way that is immensely frustrating to first time readers who had had to wait the actual six month or so gap between Graduate and Enclaves coming out. (I am basically saying here that you should have The Golden Enclaves on hand so can jump into it as quickly as possible. Because the revelations will come very fast. The grimdark gets worse, but also the sliver of hopepunk gets larger.)
In The Last Graduate, it’s senior year and El and the other seniors at the Scholomance have to get ready for graduation…which will involve a horrific gauntlet through hordes of hungry maleficaria, including two horrifically immense “mawmouths.” However, this year there seems to be a mysterious shortage, and the ones remaining appear to be targeting El…who ends up accidentally shepherding a bunch of freshman. (She will tell you it’s entirely against her will, yet she is still doing it.) A number of discoveries are made, El adopts a “no one gets left behind” ethos that includes “getting absolutely everyone out of this floating tin can. And yes I do mean everyone.” (Yes I know I’m saying variations of “horror” a lot. You’re just going to have to regard it as “said.” Invisible and ubiquitous to my reactions of this trilogy.)
Can El manage this incredible feat? Welp, the title indicates that the answer here is “no.” (So this is absolutely not a spoiler.)
In The Golden Enclaves a number of horrific discoveries are made about the construction of Enclaves. Some more horrific discoveries are made about Orion! Who it turns out, somehow survived being in a tin can packed full of terrifying monsters. The why and how he survived are also extremely horrifying! Orion is not entirely human, and that’s thanks to his mother, who is an extremely controlled malificer, who has decided that the greater good involves needing a very big stick. (That stick being poor Orion who wants None of This.)
In this book, El comes to the startling realization that she has friends. She is completely baffled by this, and her aforementioned friends are extremely exasperated with her for not realizing it. This is unexpectedly hilarious, despite some of the extremely heavy things going on within the book. The tension and action was such that it ended up being a “can’t stop reading because I don’t want to miss anything” situation. The book comes to an extremely satisfying conclusion, though not quite the way you might have anticipated.
(Note: This book had a number of instances that seemed to be references to other works. I am going to have to go through the trilogy again at some point, and maybe write some meta about it.)
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