The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance
by Naomi Novik
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| Published: 2022 Acquired and read: November 2022 |
Reading them because they were Lodestar Award finalists, I enjoyed the first two Scholomance books, especially the second, that I picked up the third when it came out. I enjoyed it, but I do think the second book, with its emphasis on working together as a team to overcome a dangerous situation, remains my favorite. This takes El out of the world of the Scholomance, into the actual world where she has to deal with the consequences of her actions in book two, what has happened to her boyfriend Orion, and the secrets that underpin her universe.
Like the first, I feel like this one had to do a lot of explaining—now that we've left the environment of the first two books, there's a lot of exposition we need. So sometimes I got lost in the thaumababble about how enclaves work; it's definitely all thought through, but sometimes I felt like the book shows its work a bit too much, like reading a Brando Sando novel. There's also a lot of politics in this one. Again, it's kind of the anti–Harry Potter; Rowling's books never really
reckon with how Hogwarts fits into a lot of quite awful structures in
the larger context of wizard society, but Novik does. I enjoyed it, and I see why the story had to engage with the broader world, but I did miss the clear focus of book two.
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