A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik

[sophia_sol]

This book is more deliberately YA flavoured than Novik's previous novels, featuring that now-classic trope of magic boarding school. The main character is a teen girl named El who is in her second-to-last year at the Scholomance, a school with no teachers and lots of deadly magic monsters that want to kill/eat the teenagers who inhabit it. (Students attend this school anyway because the rate of survival for magic teens outside the Scholomance is even worse!) El is an outsider who doesn't have friends and allies to help her survive school the way many of the kids do. But the boy who's the best at killing monsters seems weirdly invested in helping her, much to her suspicion!

Tbh my main opinion of the book is that it leaves me cold. I just never really cared! It's slick and well paced and well written, and very more-ish, but it doesn't feel to me like there's much actual heart in it. Like, I was warned it is a bit of a horror novel, but it didn't ever feel even a little bit horror to me because despite the high stakes for all the characters at all times, the stakes never felt worrying. Lots of people will die gruesomely and it's fine, basically? I think it might be a better book if it leaned more into the horror actually!

But as it was I just slid along easily through the prose to the end of the book and only had a bit of a small feeling about what was happening like, once. A little bit.

This is not Novik's usual flaw in writing, in my experience, and it's weird! Usually I CARE even if I'm mad about her choices. So I'm not sure what happened here. Especially since her most recent book before this one (Spinning Silver) was so absolutely brilliant and I adored it, and this feels like such a large step down. A really disappointing reading experience for me.

Novik does also continue her tradition of writing books that clearly and obviously need lesbians and have no lesbians, much to my dismay (and, okay, some amusement). El's male love interest Orion OBVIOUSLY needed to be a butch lesbian instead and it's a tragedy he isn't. (Not as much of a tragedy as the lack of lesbians in Spinning Silver and Uprooted though. Those ones demanded lesbians, whereas this one merely would be better with lesbians.)

On a final note: the first thing I remember hearing about this book when it came out was that it's racist, so I do feel the need to acknowledge this aspect. There was one passage about a black character's hair that was notably bad, and Novik has removed that passage from future editions and issued an apology; the ebook I read did not contain the passage in question. The other issues that I've seen raised, I've seen people of colour having widely disparate opinions as to whether they're actual issues in context or not, so I as a white person do not feel qualified to have an opinion about who's right. So that's just something to keep in mind for people interested in reading the book. But as you can probably tell from the review above, I'm not exactly recommending the book regardless!

Comments

[aria]

Yeah!! And the thing is, she and I have enough id overlap that I genuinely enjoy them sometimes -- I liked the Dragon, the tsar in Spinning Silver made me HOWL with the laughter of recognition over some trope enjoyment we share -- but Orion isn't even a fuckboy? Like, I'm not sure whether Naomi even likes him, so might as well just commit to making that boy a butch lesbian, which would be a massive improvement!

[lirazel]

The tsar is hilarious and also clearly asexual. I get a ton of enjoyment about picturing him in the future being essentially Irina's trophy husband while she runs the country. She's doing everything while he's just focused on his art and maybe, like, raising their kids.

I'm not sure whether Naomi even likes him

How weird!!! Do you think she included him just because there Needs To Be a romantic lead of that kind in a YA novel?

[sophia_sol]

Huh, I just went back and checked my review of SS (because I have no memory) and apparently I didn't read him as asexual at all, which is weird because I'm usually the first to accidentally read any given character as ace with the slightest provocation! But I absolutely agree about him being a trophy husband while she runs the country.

[lirazel]

I didn't pick up on it so much in my first read of the book, but it jumped out at me in rereads. He just seems pretty disgusted by sex in general and has no interest in it. If you ever reread it, keep an eye out and let me know if you notice it!

(My approach to all fiction is to assume a character is either ace or bi until I am explicitly, textually told otherwise.)

[sophia_sol]

I will keep an eye out for that, thank you! I'm due for a reread of the book anyway :)

Yeah het or gay is never my instinct for how to read a character either. The idea of being attracted to exactly one gender is a little baffling to me even though I know it's a thing people experience, so it takes effort from an author for me to agree a character is a) interested in sex and/or romance, and b) with a specific gender only

[lirazel]

Oh, I have so many feelings about this! I just fundamentally don't get people who are like, "No, I could never be attracted to anyone who's [gender], despite the fact that that they are half the population of the earth and so there are billions of them. Nope, there's not one person among those billions that I could be attracted to!" Whereas I do get the idea of not being attracted to anyone at all (as I am ace) and the idea of being attracted to individuals regardless of gender.

Basically: I understand bi/pan people and ace people, but I don't understand het or gay people.

[sophia_sol]

Yes exactly! Me too on all of the above, including being ace myself. The existence of gay people from highly homophobic communities (eg Evangelical christianity) has convinced me that mono attraction must exist, because that's a situation where people would be highly motivated to figure out if there's anyone of a different gender they might manage to work up an attraction to. But it still doesn't make sense to me even though I believe it exists!

[lirazel]

Right, exactly! I definitely believe mono attraction exists, and I would never question someone else's sexuality, but I'm like, "How??? Is that possible???"

[sophia_sol]

....I will admit to doing a little bit of questioning people's professed sexuality when it's people who call themselves straight but talk about their same sex "exceptions" (like, "oh I'm definitely straight but x actor is so hot that obviously anyone would be into them") and I'm like, are you sure this isn't just internalised biphobia convincing you that you must be straight?? But I wouldn't tell people that to their face unless they were genuinely asking my opinion.

[lirazel]

Right. Exactly. Even if I have my doubts, it's just none of my business unless they ask me.

[aria]

Omg I love this vision for them <3

And I'm honestly not sure what the deal is with Orion -- like, the vibe I got from Deadly Education was EXTREMELY "Harry Potter with the serial numbers filed off/text as argument with that kind of magical school story" and I just got the impression that she doesn't really care that much about Golden Boy Chosen Ones as an archetype but she was committed enough to deconstructing the text that she decided to stick with that trope instead of just dodging it entirely? I might be way off base but that was my basic read of that situation, and I still think it would have been better to do that exact thing if Orion had been a girl.

[sophia_sol]

Yeahhh Orion doesn't seem to be the kind of character she's usually interested in at all, which makes it very weird then that she chose to make him such an important part of the book. Tbh I wonder if this is part of why the book didn't engage me emotionally, because the author wasn't engaged in the characters/relationships she chose to focus on. If you care enough about a genre to write a book in conversation with it, why would you include the bits you don't care about?? That's never going to go well!

[lirazel]

Huh. I wonder if the rest of the books in the series will be a deconstruction of that trope?

Anyway, I hope she finishes this series quickly and gets back to writing things I actually want to read.

[cahn]

Yessss I super got that vibe (and I think that kind of deconstruction is hilarious, so I loved this book) and I additionally got the vibe that she was also deconstructing Dystopia YA, which usually comes with a het love triangle, so that was sort of Orion's function in the book, only she couldn't really decide whether she wanted him to actually be a love interest or just make fun of the whole love interest thing, so it came across as weirdly wishy-washy. I loved it but only from my glasses of "this is making fun of het YA," which I'm sure will be shattered in the next book because that's how Novik rolls.:)

...also, it also weirded me out that it was so clearly H/D serial-numbers-filed-off but then why just change only one of them into a girl??