The Last Graduate

, #2

eBook, 389 pages

Published Sept. 28, 2021 by Del Rey.

ASIN:
B08K7KY8Q7
4 stars (6 reviews)

In Wisdom, Shelter. That’s the official motto of the Scholomance. I suppose you could even argue that it’s true—only the wisdom is hard to come by, so the shelter’s rather scant.

Our beloved school does its best to devour all its students—but now that I’ve reached my senior year and have actually won myself a handful of allies, it’s suddenly developed a very particular craving for me. And even if I somehow make it through the endless waves of maleficaria that it keeps throwing at me in between grueling homework assignments, I haven’t any idea how my allies and I are going to make it through the graduation hall alive.

Unless, of course, I finally accept my foretold destiny of dark sorcery and destruction. That would certainly let me sail straight out of here. The course of wisdom, surely.

But I’m not giving in—not to the mals, not to fate, …

5 editions

reviewed The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #2)

More delicious malevolence

4 stars

#BookReview This book, second in Naomi Novik’s young-adult dark academia fantasy series ‘The Scholomance’, starts exactly where we left off in the first book (ramblingreaders.org/user/clare_hooley/review/558898) with our two main protagonists, our narrator El and and her perhaps boyfriend Orion, now seniors in the deadly school. The end of the senior year is when both of them will face ‘graduation’ - a literal gauntlet run through a room filled with wicked hungry magical monsters (always deliciously well-described by Novik’s writing) that, in a standard year, only about half those entering survive. Of course with El and Orion both being so exceptional, we know this isn’t going to be a standard year. El has mellowed out (grown up) from being quite so whiny and angsty, although her sarcastic streak remains undimmed, and now even has friends. Owing to events at the end of book one, she also can’t be invisible …

reviewed The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #2)

Review of 'The Last Graduate' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Middle books of trilogies are either brilliant or fall completely flat. I wondered how this would work when obviously, book 2 is el's last year.

I shouldn't have worried, of course. I enjoyed every page, and as has become no surprise, the very last sentence means you're utterly pulled into picking up book 3 immediately. I'd have been very annoyed if I were waiting for this to come out. For all that people compare these books to Harry Potter (I suppose because of a very tenuous link in that they both feature a school where you perform magic?) I can see the appeal of throwing yourself into the fanfiction scene whilst waiting for the official word as I did all those years ago in the Potterverse.

Subjects

  • American literature
  • Fiction, fantasy, contemporary
  • nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-fiction=2021-10-17
  • New York Times bestseller