So far, my big plan to read a bunch of dark academia this year isn’t really working out for me (other than The Raven Scholar). I didn’t really like this book.
Galadriel (El for short) is a junior at a boarding school for teens with magical powers. The idea behind the school (called the Scholomance) was to keep the students safe from “mals” (maleficaria) which like to eat magical humans and are particularly attracted to teens rather than children or adults. Unfortunately, long ago the defensive mechanisms of the school failed and now about half of all students are killed by mals before graduation. Parents keep sending their children to the Scholomance because their chances of survival outside are even worse–something like 90% of magicians die before they reach adulthood if they’re not at the Scholomance.
El has a special affinity for dark magic, which she fights. She becomes frenemies with Orion Lake, who’s the best in the school at fighting mals.
A bunch of other stuff happens, but this book is so overloaded with details and happenings while at the same time being very light on plot, that it’s hard to summarize. It is the first in a trilogy, so I could forgive it for being light on plot and heavy on exposition, but the exposition is provided in the form of train-of-thought run-on sentences that I found exhausting to follow. I really do not like Naomi Novik’s writing style. A lot of people disagree with me, so YMMV.
After I finish a book I like to look up reviews to see what others thought. I was surprised to learn that this book had contained a racist passage about a Black hairstyle. Had I somehow missed this in my reading, as I skimmed long, unstructured paragraphs? Turns out, I hadn’t–Novik had acknowledged the criticism of the passage and removed it from subsequent editions, including the one I read. It was really interesting to read the reviews from people whose copies had included that passage, as it naturally colored their impressions of the rest of the book and made them question other choices Novik had made. I like going into books without knowing much about them, but in this case I would have been well-served to read reviews beforehand. I most likely would have skipped this one and it would have saved me the time I spent reading a book that I didn’t really enjoy.
