The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance
by Naomi Novik

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.

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.

Hugos 2021: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Originally published: 2020
Acquired and read: June 2021

A Deadly Education: Lesson One of The Scholomance

by Naomi Novik

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.