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sophia_sol) wrote2021-08-12 07:31 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2021-08-12 07:31 pm
A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik
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!
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!
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