Starred review from July 25, 2022
Novik dazzles in her brilliant and compulsively readable final Scholomance fantasy, which picks up immediately after the events of The Last Graduate. Galadriel “El” Higgins has successfully trapped 92% of all wizard-hunting monsters, or mals, in the magical boarding school Scholomance, now her alma mater, and led her fellow students to safety—all except for her enemy turned true love, Orion Lake. El’s desperate attempts to save Orion from a fate worse than death in the belly of the same “maw-mouth” monster that ate her father can’t succeed unless she gets power from the enclaves, groups of privileged wizards living in protective pocket universes. However, several enclaves have mysteriously vanished into the void, the powerful London enclave is under attack, and the New York and Shanghai enclaves are on the brink of war. To save Orion, El and her classmates must first save the world they have struggled so hard to rejoin and a future threatened by dangers built into the foundations of the enclaves themselves. This exquisitely well-crafted work engages deeply with genre classics like the Lord of the Rings and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas while offering up its own detailed and original world full of clever parallels and a fascinating magical catch-22. Novik beautifully closes out El’s and Orion’s character arcs, paying off on groundwork laid in previous installments, and her focus on hope, resilience, and collective action makes this finale as moving as it is satisfying. This is a knockout.

Starred review from July 29, 2022

By the time of the final installment in Novik's trilogy (after A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate), protagonist El has accomplished what every student of the Scholomance school of magic hopes for: she survived graduation. Not only that, but she was able to keep most of the student body alive, destroy many of the monsters that hunt them, and basically close down the school forever. Back in the real world, however, El must face both her dark destiny of destroying the enclaves and the loss of Orion. With a quest to retrieve her love from the Scholomance, a brewing enclave war, and a destructive destiny to head off, El discovers that the enclaves may be the foundation of their magical world, but the truth of how they are built reveals that the worst monsters of the world may be themselves. Good thing El already knows that--and she is willing to fight. Novik continues to expand the foundational magical system and world in surprising ways, providing fast, exciting action and heart-wrenching emotional arcs for El. VERDICT Novik's third "Scholomance" book is a strong and satisfying finish to an exciting fantasy series.--Kristi Chadwick

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2022
After graduating from her monster-infested high school, a young witch determined to overcome her inclinations toward dark magic finds that she alone can stave off wizarding society's collapse. After spending the last four years of her life locked up in the Scholomance--a school carved from interstitial space where mages' children go to hone their craft--Galadriel "El" Higgins returns to the real world heartbroken. Following their run through a gauntlet of monsters in a grisly graduation rite, her fake boyfriend-turned-true love, Orion, shoved her through the Scholomance's magical exit and did not follow. Fearing that Orion has been eaten by a maw-mouth--a creature that hopelessly traps its victims in a painful, never-ending dying process--El sets out to end his suffering forever. Getting back into the fallen Scholomance requires a huge supply of mana, as does killing a maw-mouth, and so El must first journey to the world's most powerful wizard enclaves in search of allies. This globe-trotting adventure quickly turns into a slog, however, as triumphs and tribulations flatten under the weight of exposition and poor pacing. Much of Novik's attention here feels severely misplaced. Rare moments of tension resolve too quickly for readers to feel their impacts, and the novel founders as El continues the infodumping habit previously seen in A Deadly Education (2020) and The Last Graduate (2021), sucking the narrative pacing dry with long-winded explanations that touch on everything from other characters' motives to her own powers. We learn a lot about one interesting character only to have her promptly disappear from the story for good. El's two sexual encounters with a female frenemy serve no purpose in developing either the characters' individual stories or the narrative as a whole. An enemy El assures us is "an evil monster" earns her redemption with little to no explanation, and everything readers already know--from the way El memorized her friends' phone numbers to the purpose and value of mana--is bound to be reiterated again and again. A high-concept adventure that doesn't think its readers are clever enough to get it.

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