A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

While reading this book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the parallels to Cassandra Clare and Holly Black’s Magisterium series:

• A boarding school where students have to prove themselves capable of great feats of magic to graduate;
• a main character who wields dark magic and is prophesied to do great evil;
• the main character’s best friend who is a golden child and viewed as the hero;
• a developing group of friends/allies so the main character isn’t alone and has some reinforcement around their desire to stay good.

I don’t mean to say that this book felt cribbed; Novik brought a darker, more mature perspective to her story, with a different plot, a more dangerous world, and a clear message about inequality. I appreciated how the main character, Galadriel, had to navigate systemic bias and decide how to interact with students who were unaware of their own privilege. I also enjoyed seeing Galadriel’s friendships develop — and how naturally those friendships arose from her fair and respectful, albeit prickly, interactions with her peers — although I had trouble understanding how Orion had managed to get by so long being so incredibly dumb.

But in the end, whether it was the similarities to other books about coming of age in a magic school or my own fatigue around young adult fiction, I just couldn’t get excited enough about this story to continue the series.