Book Review: THE LAST GRADUATE (The Scholomance # 2) by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn't been written yet, and in its place I'd inscribed one line with my own hand: AND THEN THEY GRADUATED FROM THE SCHOLOMANCE."

For a happy Sunday, I was reunited with El and Orion, and if we placed our heroine and hero beside Hermione and Harry, Rowling's characters would pale in comparison.

I was once again inside the Scholomance, a school originally founded to educate and keep young wizards safe from all evil beings bent on eating them, but which had lost its way. Only a small ratio of its seniors were expected to graduate alive, as only the richest, brightest and cruelest made it out the gates. All the rest? Dead.

In a wizard-eats-wizard world, in a culture where students look for ways to paint targets on others' backs to avoid being hunted themselves, El dares to re-imagine a different world.

And yes, in case you were wondering, the whole series is indeed a clever metaphor for the reality of top tier colleges becoming feeders into a selfish capitalist system, where the rich get richer while the poor get more downtrodden.

And that's what makes this teacher-reader root for El so much.

Because that's what good schools ought to do: produce critical thinkers who will look at the corruption and mediocrity of the world around them and say, "This isn't right. We could do better."

And BECAUSE the fantasy novel is built on that real world truth, Novik's book doesn't feel escapist at all, no matter how many incantations and monsters are in it. (In fairness, after Rowling's series on a wizarding school, Novik did a truly magnificent job in coming up with all original spells and enemies! That couldn't have been easy!)

For some reason I thought this was Book 2 in a duology, and kept wondering all throughout why it didn't "feel" like the ending of a series.

And then Novik pulls an Agatha Christie in AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, and literally breaks my world apart with the last sentence, the last few words!!!

I let out a heartfelt curse when I read this, startling my poor sister in the same room!

Breathlessly, I Googled THE + SCHOLOMANCE + duology, and THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET because in under a minute, my blood pressure began to revert to normal again when I saw the magic words "Book 3 coming out in September 2022." Huhuhuhu.

Only a few months to go!!!!

If you're starting on this series only now, all I can say, BUY ALL THREE BOOKS ALREADY!

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