Naomi Novik (Uprooted; Spinning Silver) starts her Scholomance series with A Deadly Education, an aptly named novel about a teen wizard in a magic school full of things that would like to kill her. Intricate world-building, a nuanced and diverse cast and a thrilling plot culminate in the kind of pulse-pounding ending that resolves much, but sets up the next installment with unanswered questions and dangers both new and old.
El attends a school suspended in "the void" that's designed to protect magical youth from attacks by maleficaria (mals), but it also requires regular feedings in order to keep existing. At the end of every year, this ever-shifting tower twists down one level, dropping the graduating students back into the real world and straight into a pit of hungry monsters, able to lurk there due to a broken automated monster-killing system. Although enrollment in this school has drastically reduced youth death rates, small mals are able to sneak into the upper levels via heating ducts and plumbing, killing a not-insignificant number of students, feeding both themselves and the school.
As a junior, El isn't in immediate danger of graduating, but due to her magical affinity for destruction she has always been a magnet for mals, so they find her anyway. Privileged and powerful, Orion Lake has dedicated his last three years to protecting his classmates with his affinity for monster-slaying. Unfortunately, this upsets the balance and without all those dead students feeding the mals and the school itself, the mals waiting below are hungrier than ever and desperate to break into the school.
Orion doesn't have any friends who don't want something from him, so he starts following El around. She's caustic, sarcastic and absolutely unimpressed with his heroics. She's also the only person who treats Orion like a person. Faced with sudden Orion-induced popularity, El has to decide who she wants to be and how she wants to get there. Between the setting and the coming-of-age story, this could have been written as a young adult novel, but the prose and world-building are more like the adult fantasy it's billed as.
Told entirely from El's point of view, A Deadly Education delivers a heroine working hard to thwart a dark destiny. She's determined not to care what her classmates think, making her character arc--based on reluctant friendships and grudging alliances--satisfying, as is her growing mastery of her magical affinity. Novik somehow conjures up a heroine perched on the line between good and evil, a protagonist readers can cheer for even as they wait for her to dip her toe into the darker side of magic. A Deadly Education is a spellbinding start to Novik's new series. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels
Shelf Talker: Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is a dark, nuanced take on the magic school genre, featuring a heroine with sharp edges in a diverse world.