Well, this was a hell of a good time. I had my doubts for a second there, because I was kind of hoping for something more in the vein of "Spinning Silver," but once I accepted that that was not the kind of book this was it was kind of hard not to love it for the entertainment it delivered. At first, it reminded me a bit of Blue Exorcist or Soul Eater: it's definitely in that anime vein of one insane monster-creature after another, barely pausing for breath - especially in the beginning. And I do believe that's what first captured me - the full throttle-ness of it - but by the end I was there, 100%, for the characters. I really came to love El as a narrator and enjoyed watching her developing relationships with the other students (Orion especially, natch), and was really pleased with where she ended up by the end. Novik does some really cool things re: subverting expectations about the character types here, so much so that when we got to that last wham line of the book I literally gasped out loud.

Now, are there issues here? Yeah. There are for sure way too many info dumps throughout the entirety of the book. The saving grace - for me, at least - was that 8 out of 10 info dumps tended to be interesting. But some of them, especially towards the end, were a touch redundant and, I felt, could have been trimmed or eliminated entirely. But honestly if you're hooked into the story enough (as I was) they don't really diminish the enjoyment of it that much. I mean...I'm definitely coming back for the next installment. This world and these characters are too fun to not want another book with. I believe if you go into this book expecting a good time (and not something like "Spinning Silver" or "Uprooted") you'll definitely enjoy this.

(This review will also be posted on Goodreads.)

With a snarky main character and great world-building within our actual world, this book is perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and The Magicians. Novik creates a system of magic that actually makes physical sense and has somehow come up with a magical world that I don't want to be a part of but that I love reading about. It's labelled as Adult, but I could give this to someone who is 16+.

Welcome to the Scholomance, an automated school of magic where thousands of budding wizards learn how to use their powers while trying not to get devoured by ravenous monsters. It is a desperate existence, but the darkness is tempered by the sarcastic voice with which the story is told. We see the world through the eyes of Galadriel, or El, whom fate is trying to force down a path of power, destruction and pain, but who really wants to make some friends and be accepted by her peers. Opposite El is Orion, the shining star of the Scholomance, adored by all; but is Orion really the mortal enemy that El believes him to be? Naomi Novik takes the familiar “school of magic” trope and plays an intriguing game with it in A Deadly Education, conducting a conversation on power and privilege, friends and enemies, and working together versus going it alone. Fans of dark humor, magic school narratives, and excellent character development will enjoy A Deadly Education, and will be impatiently waiting the next installment in this new series.

This was not what I was expecting it to be. I’m very used to Novak’s writing with her fairy tale like stories. So Spinning Silver and Uprooted. They are probably my two favorite books. A Deadly Education is nothing like them. Even though there was so many possibilities of, well death, I had a fun time reading this. I loved the characters, the world, and how the magic worked. Novak did it again by getting me to love her words and I can’t wait for her next book.

I thought this was a great beginning to a series. I'm excited for the next installment. This is the first book I've read by this author, but I'm definitely going to pick up some of her other books now.

It has been ages since I read a young adult book, and perhaps longer since I read anything in the "magic school" sort of genre. I hate Harry Potter, so I was really pleased that the blurb mentioned that this school wasn't anything like Hogwarts. And it certainly isn't! There is some really fun world-building, both of the inner workings inside the school and the wider world of magic outside it. I found the writing really engaging, and I certainly related more than a little to the main character. I will definitely read more of the series and also pick up some of Novik's other books!

A Deadly Education kicks off a new fantasy series by Naomi Novik. Take the magical school trope and combine it with survival of the fittest with a main character with the ability to destroy the planet.

El, short for Galadriel, grew up in a commune with her hippie healer mom. Unfortunately, El’s magical affinity is for dark magic. Plus she’s a snarky, prickly hedgehog of a human. And it’s possible that she’s going to destroy the world. So not many friends.

El is a student at The Scholomance, a magical school existing in a void cutoff from the regular world. The school is full of magical creatures constantly trying to kill the students. It’s not even safe to brush your teeth alone. And no one leaves their rooms after lights out.

Unsurprisingly, students band together for protection. But El’s natural reserve plus students’ suspicions about her dark magic make alliances hard and friendships even harder.

Until her junior year when her snarky ways attract the friendship of the most talented and popular student in the junior class, Orion. He’s all of the things El isn’t - white, privileged, well connected, wealthy. Onc Orion starts sitting with her at lunch and sitting with her in the library, other students start to accept her. Which is what she’s always wanted, right?

I appreciate how the author’s created a diverse group of characters and works socioeconomic observations into the story. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next book.

Thank you NetGalley and Del Rey for the DRC.

I'm a fan of Naomi Novik but I'm surprised with how much I loved this book.

Galadriel (her mother being the type of person who names her daughter after a Lord of the Rings character) has an affinity for evil spells. If she wants to learn how to create flame, she can end up burning down a building if she's not careful. However, her mother has raised her with love and empathy so El is careful with her spell casting. She does understand people being bad. Unfortunately, people sense something is off with her and she's an outcast in a school where if you're not careful, monsters will eat you.

I love El. She's prickly and smart. I loved reading her thought process when she's facing a moral crossroads. The world she lives in is very cruel and unfair. There is a prophecy that makes it seem that she will end the world. However, if she wants to end how classist their society is then there's nothing evil about her.

Watching her gain friends was well written journey. She had to trust that people will help her without any profit.

I'm going to sit here and be sad that I have to wait for the next book in the series.

A heroic fantasy novel with a YA slant from the author of Spinning Silver and Uprooted. Think Harry Potter meets Hunger Games with the ironic style of The Name of the Wind.

The action takes place at Scholomance — a school for the magically gifted. Unlike Hogwarts, however, there are no kindly Dumbledores anxious to help you survive and master your skills. Indeed, there are no teachers, or adults, or even any communication with the outside. Induction into the Scholomance is sudden and permanent. The only way out is to graduate, and there a lot of malevolent beasties that will do their best to ensure you make a tasty magic meal rather than a full wizard.

El (short for Galadriel — don’t ask) has an affinity for mass destruction — not what you want if you desire to be a “good witch”! She is roundly shunned by most — but is this because of her affinity for evil or because she is rude, off putting, and endlessly defensive? And the local hero, Orion Lake, keeps saving her life. How annoying!

The world building is complete and awesome — crawling with outlandish and execrable monsters, arcane rules and physics that doesn’t work in any way that I’ve experienced. Full of action (which normally bores me but somehow the sarcasm and wit and characters that I cared about in spite of myself carried me along quickly). Some not-so-thinly disguised political commentary on the haves and have-nots, but well-done and not completely one-sided. Overall enjoyable. I admit to liking Spinning Silver and Uprooted a little bit more but found this eminently consumable. Looks like it may be a series based on the last line of this book (not a cliff hanger in any sense but a promise of more to come).

Naomi Novik has quickly become one of my favorite authors and this book just cements that. I can't wait to recommend her newest novel to my patrons!

YES! I kind every page of this book. What an absolute dream. This author is quickly becoming a personal auto-buy.

Fantastic. As a first book, it was mostly focused on world and character development. But OH the characters. Diverse, interesting, and they change in realistic ways. Super fascinating world and the reviews that call this a dark, feminist Harry Potter are right in only good ways. Excited to read what’s next.

What a ride! I loved both Uprooted and Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, so I was very excited to have the opportunity to read A Deadly Education. I was not disappointed. El (full name Galadriel) is an engaging narrator, battling her affinity for monstrous destruction due to her completely wholesome upbringing. Novik incorporated the nature vs. nurture debate as well as issues with white privilege into this fantasy story that turns our usual ideas about a magic school sideways. I appreciated the thorny main character who has been so rejected and isolated all her life that she has started pushing everyone else away in order to keep herself from getting hurt. But with graduation looming, she knows that she can't really go it alone. And I love that even with her flaws and frustrations, she can't help but be good after the way her mum raised her, despite knowing that it would be so much easier to go bad.

I loved watching El develop actual friendships, and watching her marvel at how that happened. It felt completely real and in character for her to be totally baffled by Orion and his attitudes as well as actions, but I appreciated the way that we all gained understanding about his backstory. I can imagine all the characters in this story in real life, even the ones I loved to hate. And the ending absolutely hooked me for the next book. What is El going to do?

3.75/5 - While A Deadly Education is a dark and deadly take on a magic school story, it is weighed down by excessive exposition and info-dumping that takes away from an otherwise awesome premise. We follow El - short for Galadriel, don’t ask - a junior at The Scholomance, an underground magical school that’s vaguely reminiscent of Hogwarts, if everyone was a Slytherin, the school was filled with monsters, and the building routinely tried to kill all its students.

El is a loner with an affinity for dark magic, and despite her attempts to stay good, she draws the suspicion of the school’s kid with a savior complex, Orion. El and Orion form an unlikely friendship - she’s the first person he’s come across who doesn’t worship the ground he walks on - and El gets a taste of all the perks and benefits being a kid from a powerful faction comes with. Orion has thrown off the balance of energy in the school by saving so many students slated for death, and the monsters lurking in the corners are hungry. When seriously bad ones start cropping up across the school, El and her new friends band together to try to fix the mess Orion has created.

Despite the creepy atmosphere and characters with a lot of potential, this book spends most of its time telling, not showing. The prose is bogged down by lengthy excerpts explaining how the school works, or the political situation outside the school, or some anecdote from El’s childhood. Instead of a dark, magical adventure, we spend over half this novel listening to El talk at us. Unfortunately, the infodumping doesn’t die off after the first part of the book - we get large asides of exposition well into the last chapter. I wish we’d gotten to see more of this dark and bizarre magical world in action rather than just hearing about it.

Overall, I still enjoyed the story despite the infodumping and slow pacing. When the action picked up, it was thrilling and dark and twisty. Using a magic school that operates under the illusion of meritocracy to examine privilege was so well executed. While the writing didn’t quite live up to my expectations for Naomi Novik, it was still a creative world with interesting concepts and characters I grew to love. Readers looking for the grimdark response to Harry Potter will eat this up. While this is an adult title, I can see it having crossover appeal for edgy, older teens looking for blood and guts and existential dread.

I've never read a fantasy that made me feel completely relieved to not have magic. In A DEADLY EDUCATION, Naomi Novik has conjured a brutal world and pit it against a cunning protagonist determined to survive. Imagine if you will that Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen adopted a daughter, she would be Galadriel, "El" for short. In El, Novik combines all the smarts and radical thinking of Hermione with Katniss's grit and determination to create a truly marvelous protagonist that I couldn't stop thinking about.

The Earth that El lives in is terrifying and savage, with monsters constantly popping out trying to eat her and her schoolmates. You can't even shower in peace without some ghouly beast slithering out of a drainpipe and slurping you up! The Scholomance makes Hogwarts and The Hungers Games look like baby-proofed playgrounds. It's been over a week since I read it and I still won't walk into unlit rooms and check under my bed *just in case.* You never know what might have cropped up under there...

I don't know how she does it, but Novik just keeps getting better and better - I hope she's not using malia!

I have to admit, Naomi Novik surprised me with this one. Based on genre alone, A Deadly Education is different from anything she's published so far. It pains me to say that I found myself a bit confused when the book first kicks off. The novel talks about how the kids are put in the school to keep them safe from the horrible monsters in the real world that would kill/eat/turn them evil, yet every other sentence has them fending off said monsters that have gotten inside the school anyway. Either they've been lied to or the school has really dropped the ball.

That aside, I did enjoy our female lead. El had the kind of snark and attitude that I found extremely enjoyable. Her ultimate frustration with the campus 'good-guy' type, Orion, reminded me a bit of the novel The Rest Of Us Just Live Here, wherein a group of normal students has to deal with the fallout from what the 'chosen ones' wreak on the school year. El is done with Orion almost before we even meet him. I thought her internal tone was well balanced for the darkness of the world around them, giving a sense of humor to the crazy things they were going through. I also enjoyed the side characters. I do have to say that it felt the plot didn't really pick up right away, there were at least 5-6 chapters of exposition and minor conflict before anything really started pointing toward a higher plotline. Other than that, this novel was really enjoyable. I personally prefer her fairy tale series because I'm weak to dark fairy tales, but this was not a let-down in any way.

Rating: 3.8/5 Stars

Novik is an impressively versatile writer. A Deadly Education is certainly a tonal shift from her previous work, but she rocks it, as usual! Scary world and appealing characters.

This was SO GOOD. Wow. Talk about a "dark feminist Harry Potter" blurb actually living up to its title!! This was excellent. I can't wait for more from Galadriel and Orion. I'll be recommending this one up and down in 2020.

A staggeringly impressive start to a new series, Naomi Novik sets the "magical school" genre of fantasy fiction ablaze with a dark, amusing, and irreverent novel that will have both Adult and YA fantasy readers eagerly awaiting the second entry. I found myself continually delighted and appalled at the macabre school depicted in these pages, and quickly recognized that the school itself is as much a character as any named individual in the book. Highly recommended for its cross-age group appeal and the strength of the characters, setting, and writing. Practically a must-have for any fantasy collection.

I was excited to get into Naomi Novik's new book, and now I'm excited to see where this story goes forth in the book(s) to follow. Harry Potter for adults? Hell yes. As this is book one, it does a lot of world building and character presentation. El is such a funny and badass heroine and she's almost unstoppable in how she functions. The entire premise of the book is so interesting and I did love the Novik didn't do certain conventional things like for example, the romance aspect between El and Orion. They're a set of two different types of people and the flirtation between them is almost something that you can pass by. It's a unique read, but I did get the feel that this was more YA than adult, and I feel like that made the book not be as great as it could've been.