Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife-and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing.
Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. 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.Ī high-concept adventure that doesn't think its readers are clever enough to get it.Ī fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit. 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. We learn a lot about one interesting character only to have her promptly disappear from the story for good. 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. Much of Novik's attention here feels severely misplaced. This globe-trotting adventure quickly turns into a slog, however, as triumphs and tribulations flatten under the weight of exposition and poor pacing.
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.
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. 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. 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.Īfter 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.
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