Hugos 2022: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate: Lesson Two of The Scholomance
by Naomi Novik

One of the most effective moments I've ever witnessed in fantasy worldbuilding comes in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. The book does such a good job with the concept of the dæmons, especially the idea that they are inseparable from their humans, that a mere 150 pages after you learn about this, it viscerally feels like a violation when you discover people out there are separating humans from their dæmons.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: May 2022
Read: July 2022

Similarly, The Last Graduate has a moment in it that builds on the extensive worldbuilding done here and in the series' first book, A Deadly Education. Our protagonist, El, realizes that the world does not function the way she thought it does. The rules of how the world does work have been so enmeshed in the mind of the reader, that the idea they could work differently feels as disruptive to you the reader as it does to her, a person who actually lives in this world. And it's not just that the world doesn't work the way she thought: it means something for what she will have to do.

I thought A Deadly Education was pretty good, but that it began climaxing at a point where it should have begun escalating. Well, this book really does escalate things. I don't know if A Deadly Education needed to be exactly the way it was, but The Last Graduate takes an expert turn in plot, world, and character that needed the detailed foundation laid in the first book. I said that the first book felt like an interesting Harry Potter riff; this one moves beyond that to be about something. When I read Last Graduate, I felt that Novik was capable of more because I'd read Spinning Silver; now I see that she is up to more, actually something similar to what she was up to in Spinning Silver. That book contains this line that has stayed with me:

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

The world of the Scholomance is a brutal one: you have to keep yourself alive at the cost of others because if you don't, you will die. The Last Graduate begins to interrogate that assumption in a way that moves toward an impressive ethic of care. (And, incidentally, reads as a pretty compelling analogy for climate change—or any other entrenched, generational problem.) A Deadly Education was a pretty good novel; The Last Graduate was a great one, and the best Hugo-nominated* novel I've read thus far this year.

* Well, technically, Lodestar-nominated.