Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“READER, I RAN the f*** away.”

A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik

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CBR Bingo – Strange Worlds Our heroine Galadriel, aka El, a sort of magical Wednesday Adams, is fighting for her life at a teacher-less school of magic, only this Hogwarts is actively trying to kill its students. They attend classes, sleep in dorms, eat in a cafeteria, and are trapped there with no contact with the outside world as they make their way through this distorted high school experience. Everything is leading up to their graduation day, which tests the seniors’ mettle and skill and […]

This should have been my tenth review of the year – not sure what happened there

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

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This is the concluding volume in a trilogy. It won’t really work for you unless you’ve read the previous two books. Start with A Deadly Education. Also, this review will contain spoilers for the previous book in the series, so proceed at your own risk if you’re not caught up. Galadriel “El” Higgins has done the impossible. She has not only made it out of the Scholomance with her entire graduating senior class, but with every other student in the school as well. Everyone is […]

“My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself.”

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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CBR Passport Challenge: Books Recommended by Friends This is the second book in a trilogy. It doesn’t really make sense if you’ve not read the series from the beginning. So if you’re not caught up, go read A Deadly Education. It’s great, I’ll wait. El and Orion are now seniors in the Scholomance, and they have absolutely no way of knowing if their very dangerous mission just before graduation to fix the furnaces worked. Did they manage to clear the graduation hall of the majority […]

This ending made me love the series more.

The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3) by Naomi Novik

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This was such a great series, and this book a great ending to it. I feel like I was waiting for sure to say that until I finished this book, and now I can say with certainty that The Scholomance is worth reading. It all just comes together SO WELL. I was happy with the story on the surface, I was happy with the characters and their arcs, and I was happy with what is going on underneath. This one picks up exactly where we […]

Re-reads in anticipation of the last–Scholomance delivers

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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Re-re-read in advance of The Golden Enclaves, September 2022 Knowing now what I know about how this book is actually a semi-subversive (and by which I mean not at all subversive, was I just under a rock this whole while?) pushback on JKR’s Wizarding World(TM), it’s doubly fascinating to re-re-enter the world of the Scholomance through the eyes of El, our crotchety crocheting evil enchantress in the making. I had read once that Novik wrote Scholomance in a response to the logical inconsistencies of the Potterverse, […]

Two people with a hero complex off to save the school

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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This is the second book in the Scholomance trilogy: the first, A Deadly Education, told El’s story in the last three weeks of her junior year at the school of magic, the Scholomance, and how her efforts and those of her friends have, she hopes, helped most of the seniors graduate without significant casualties. This second book covers El’s senior year, starting off with what El considers the worst possible assignment: her study hall as the sole senior in a classroom of young, inexperienced freshmen. […]



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