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| Originally published: 2020 Acquired and read: June 2021 |
This reads like Naomi Novik started with Harry Potter and worked backward to justify it: why would you send your child to a magic school where it seems like immensely dangerous things are always happening? Then she worked forward from those justifications and built up a world and story around them. I found that quite clever. The main character is fun, and so is her place in the world; Novik does some great worldbuilding here. I'm sure she is a Harry Potter fan, but it does feel a bit like "Harry Potter done right."
One hundred and fifty pages in, though, and I felt like we were just getting started, still building the world, and what this book was actually about was unclear to me. I didn't feel like a central conflict had been introduced that this book would resolve; we just had the general premise of the whole series. Then, suddenly, it was, and the book quickly ran to its ending. I get that it's meant to be sudden in the narrative, too, but the only previous Novik I've read is Spinning Silver, which was over double the length of this book, and used its length highly effectively. Without having actually read the next book yet, it felt like this one had been arbitrarily cut off for reasons I don't really understand, when really this book should have kept on developing for some time. (If it's because of length and genre—unlike Novik's other work, this seems to be marketed as YA, albeit half-heartedly—then why is literally every Lodestar finalist longer?)
So as a 500-page book, I think this could have been great, but it resolves at the point it ought to have been complicating.
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