The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik

Well....I liked it better than the first book in this trilogy. Unfortunately still not my thing though! Like, is it doing lots of things that SHOULD be my thing? It is!

It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities

HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.

I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.

Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.

It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.

(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)