The Scholomance is a boarding school where the magically gifted go to learn. There are no teachers and no breaks and the school is literally crawling with monsters, waiting to do away with the students one by one until graduation day where any students left will fight for their lives. But what happens when a new girl arrives at the school who might have the power to destroy all the monsters?
I had a hard time getting into this book. I really enjoyed two of Naomi Novik’s previous books – Uprooted and Spinning Silver – so I thought I would like this one as well. Unfortunately, it felt like there was a lot of info-dumping in this book but not much is really explained. When the book begins we are just thrown into the middle of the school year and there are a lot of magic words and concepts introduced and I felt it was a little difficult to follow the story. To be honest, I actually had to read a couple reviews when I was finished to try to figure out some things. So I was a little lost in the beginning and wasn’t sure where the story was going.
I did think that the last 25% of the book was the best part. The action picks up and I felt like the story finally found its rhythm. The main character interacts more with other people and I started to actually like her. It felt like right when I was getting into the book, it ended.
The main character Galadriel (or El) is an antihero in that she is rude and prickly and extremely unlikable. She is also apparently the most powerful person at the school but she can’t tell anyone. She is always talking about how she has no friends and no one will sit next to her and how she always has to sit at the worst desk, but it seems like if she just showed a little bit of her power the other students would like her. We are supposed to understand that El has the potential to become a dark sorceress which is why she doesn’t show her full magic capability but if the whole point of the school is surviving until and making it through graduation I would think that showing her power would help El make allies.
I did enjoy the world-building although I would have liked to know more about the world outside of the school. The book ends on a cliffhanger and I want to know what happens, so I will probably read the next book when it comes out.
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