A Deadly Education ~ Naomi Novik
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is the first in the Scholomance series. The first lesson to learn at the Scholomance is that failure means death. There are no teachers, no holidays and no friendships, only strategic alliances for the magically gifted. El is different, she hasn’t made any alliances and is just spending her time surviving. Orion Lake, however, doesn’t seem to understand the rules, he spends his time saving the other students, El included, despite the fact that she could destroy them all without any effort.
This is one of the books I bought at YALC and I am slowly getting around to reading them all. I chose it because I wanted something to break up the library books and this looked the slimmest of all in my TBR stack. It did end up taking me a little longer than I thought to read as it is a bit slow-paced to start with and once it gets going is quite a medium-paced book.
To start with, I wasn’t sold on El as the protagonist, she was angry and rude and just a little dislikable. She felt a little too much like the YA ‘I’m not like other girls’ stereotype. However, she did develop really well and became a likeable character. It was also interesting to see how El’s character arc also impacted other characters’ arcs. I quite liked Orion, he was an honest character and also felt very genuine and kind, the complete opposite of El.
The plot was a little stagnant. It didn’t feel like there was a huge amount of plot for all the reading I was doing. There was definitely a lot of expositional content that I assume is setting up the future of the series. It made it a little heavy going at some points. When the plot did rank up, the story was very interesting and I couldn’t wait to sit down and discover what happened next.
Overall, I enjoyed it and am curious to see how the next books in the series develop the story and the characters, but it’s not something I’m going to be rushing for. It doesn’t bother me that it might take a while for me to get around to ordering the next book. I gave A Deadly Education four stars.
C🌙
