A Turn of the Page

I read Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education because I wanted Harry Potter without the baggage. Magical school? Check. Wizarding community living in parallel to our own? Check. The death of children on a massive scale? …check? So, yes, superficially A Deadly Education and its sequels (The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves) bear some similarities to the Harry Potter books. Really, though, the similarities stop at the magical school and the wizarding community. Novik’s books are really more about murder at a societal scale.

So. A quick rundown. Galadriel Higgins (El) is a young witch who is prophesied to bring death and destruction to the world, something she plans to do her best to avoid. She attends the Scholomance, a school developed by the world’s largest wizarding communities to train and protect magical children from the evil creatures (mals) constantly seeking to kill them. The school does a poor job of that, so the magical children are constantly killed/eaten/dismembered/dissolved — relatively few of them make it to graduation, which is of course a horrific ritual that forces the young magic users to fight their way through thousands of magical creatures. In A Deadly Education, El (a junior at the Scholomance) makes friends for the first time and repairs some of the machinery intended to help keep the school safe. The Last Graduate follows El and her friends through their senior year as they devise a scheme to destroy the school forever.

This brings us to The Golden Enclaves, the third¹ book in the series. El, now free of the Scholomance, must return to the school in order to rescue a friend left behind when she and the rest of the students escaped at the end of The Last Graduate. Along the way she discovers the horrifying foundation of the power and privilege held by wizarding communities (or enclaves) and navigates the trauma of having lived in a horrific murder school for four years. And the book is fun! It’s really fun, as were the previous books in the series.

Part of what makes El work so well as a character is that she is mad at the same things that probably make you, the reader, mad about the world she lives in. Do you think it’s weird that all the magical children are locked in a school for four years with relatively low odds of survival? El does, too! Are you infuriated by the imperialist power structures that dictate privilege within the wizarding world? El, too! Her absurd, massive, over the top rage at the massive inequities in her world and her willingness to break the structures that support them is fun! It’s cathartic in the best way.

El’s friends are great, too. Aadhya and Liesl, both of whom were fun in A Deadly Eduction and The Last Graduate, are particularly well served by The Golden Enclaves. Orion Lake, the Harry Potter analogue incapable of anything other than killing magical monsters, gets to reckon with his place in the world in a way he really, really needed to after the conclusion of The Last Graduate. El’s friends blunt her temper and help her to navigate the world in ways that (mostly) avoid the death and destruction she hopes not to create. Some of these relationships, built over the course of three books, reach really moving peaks in the conclusion to the trilogy.

I have a few nitpicks, though. Liu, another close friend of El’s, has a very small role in the novel. Where previously Liu had been a core part of the story, in The Golden Enclaves she is the victim of a hugely traumatic event, the impact of which isn’t really sufficiently explored. El realizes that some of her earlier actions may have killed hundreds of wizards, if not thousands. While it’s true that she had no way of knowing (and that the aforementioned imperialist power structures are really at fault), it’s tough to reconcile El’s fundamental goodness as a person with her relative lack of remorse.

One final complaint. A lot of the action in The Golden Enclaves suffers from but-what-if-I-just-explained-it-to-you-itis. There is, quite simply, far too much exposition. The final confrontation, for instance, suddenly gains new stakes when a character not introduced until the very last moment arrives to explain to El why he can be trusted, point out what she should do, and provide crucial historical context for the events of the entire trilogy. All of the exposition is interesting — a good deal of it is even a lot of fun — but it has the unfortunate effect of blunting moments that could be more impactful.

I did really enjoy The Golden Enclaves, just as I enjoyed A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate. It’s hard to wrap up a series in a satisfying way, and Naomi Novik has definitely done that here. The book isn’t flawless by any means, but it does justice to El and to many of her friends while simultaneously starting to dig into the systems of power that perpetuate global wizarding inequality. And it’s fun! That’s no small feat.