What a great follow up to a dark YA fantasy perfect for those who read Harry Potter growing up and now look for the dark and mature-ish fanfic. I understand the backlash with the first one, and I am happy to say that this one makes efforts to improve those missteps and I felt that this book did well enough to correct those.

I was a huge fan of A Deadly Education so I was SO incredibly excited when I saw this ARC available on NetGalley. The Last Graduate did not disappoint even a bit! The world Naomi Novik has built within this series is so fascinating and Gal is such a relatable character.

I love how the romance between Gal and Orion is being played out, it's necessary for them to stay apart but god it's so painfully hard! The end was a freaking CLIFFHANGER and I'm already anxiously awaiting the next installment.

5/5 would absolutely recommend if you're into magical/fantasy at all! A wonderful story with amazing world building and character development.

This is a fast paced, fun YA horror novel, and I devoured this book so quickly that I want to go back and read the first book, A Deadly Education, and this one again at a more leisurely pace. The Last Graduate picks up just a few minutes after the ending of A Deadly Education, so it is a good idea to read A Deadly Education first. If you liked the first book, you will love the second. We get El's snarky voice and watch her evolve from an outsider to a powerhouse and leader as she and all the other students plot graduation battle strategies. I liked seeing her development and how her relationships changed, not just with Orion and Aadhya but with the rest of the school as well. We also get a deeper look at the world and its politics, about the social and political hierarchy within their magical world. While I thought A Deadly Education set up an interesting illustration of class, highlighting the differences between the haves and have nots within the school, The Last Graduate pulls in the world outside and shows how these forces affect everyone within the Scholomance. El evolves a lot from thinking about not just her own small circle of friends to thinking about the wider world and how to change the status quo to be better for everyone. Highly recommend and I can't wait to read the third and final book in the trilogy.

If I could only read one book this year, this had to be the one. Naomi Novik is a stellar author, and her character of El (short for Galadriel) is a complex and nuanced protagonist that had me cheering for her throughout. Having survived the grueling battle at the end of "A Deadly Education", former outcast El is now a senior, has found a team, and friends.. But with so few students dead in the last year, the school itself seems to be out to get her, and a disaster has struck outside the school which might have changed the balance of power in the magical world forever. As the final battle of Graduation looms ever nearer, El finds herself tested constantly, forced to weigh survival against dreaming of a better future she might not live to see.

Naomi Novik's second installment in the Scholomance series is a blast. It picks up directly after A Deadly Education and continues the adventures of the protagonist, 17-year-old El. While the Scholomance series has flaws--excessive exposition, repetition, the underwritten romantic relationship--the series is *just so fun*. Novik is an outstanding world-builder. Unsurprisingly, the Scholomance series often reminds me of the Harry Potter series, in that I will forgive it a great deal just for the opportunity to spend more time in the world Novik creates. In The Last Graduate, Novik shows El's emotional growth and her transition into being a more ethical person. I hope that the third book in the series allows her to find some sort of personal fulfillment. I have no doubt that Novik will keep me turning the pages either way.

This is the second book of the Scholomance trilogy, which takes up immediately where “A Deadly Education” left off.

Galadriel, known as El, is now 17 and a senior in the Scholomance for sorcerers, a sentient boarding school sort of like a very dark version of Hogwarts.   Every day in the school the students - more than 4,000 of them - face an obstacle course full of monsters (“maleficaria” or “mals”) trying to kill and eat them.  “Graduation” is the final big test, when, in order to get out of the school, they have to run through a gauntlet of all the hungry mals lying in wait; less than a quarter of the class is ever expected to survive.  El thinks this isn't so bad; she calculates that if you’re an indie kid like she is (not part of an enclave of other wizards), and you don’t get into the Scholomance, your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty.  Thus, “one in four is plenty decent odds compared to that.”

Students try to make alliances to help protect one another because they basically have to in order to survive, so everything becomes transactional - e.g., I will pry a tray of food away from grasping mals for you in the cafeteria if you get them away from a place to sit at a table.

El never had friends before, but now she is an important part of an alliance, and even has a boyfriend, Orion Lake. Together, El and Orion are considered among the most important students in the school: Orion has an ability to destroy most of the mals that roam through the school, and El has the ability to destroy, well, everything, is she wants to.

The modus operandi at the Scholomance has always been to look out for yourself and your own survival first, only giving as much as you have to in order to ensure that occurs. Alas, having friends and relationships has created in El the inconvenient tendency to start to care about others, and whether they survive. This makes her, in her own (previous) estimation, a “complete numpty.” But the appeal of not being alone anymore is more powerful than any magic she knows. It saves her, and she wants to save everyone else in return. She finds herself copycatting Orion’s “stupid noble-hero routine” and so the school comes after her - sending mals after her alone. But then she discovers what the school really wants from her. The question is, can she get all the other students to go along with it, even if it means taking risks for others besides yourself with no payoff?

Evaluation: As the days flew by to the big graduation test of survival, I found myself flying through the pages as well. And wow, what an ending! I can’t wait for the third book!

Oh wow, this was good. I expected to be entertained, because I was definitely engrossed by A Deadly Education, but this book went well above and beyond the first in the series. I enjoyed A Deadly Education because of how darkly delightful it was: it felt a bit like a monster-centric anime to me: high-octane, heavy on the world-building, with lots of cool twists and turns. Well, The Last Graduate is all of that plus magnificent character arcs (and an amazing plot arc that's way too spoilery to discuss here). Not saying that the first book didn't have good characterization - it would be impossible to enjoy reading it without being invested in El's Elness - but it felt like that book was more about setting up the characterization pay-off in this one. Novik does some really, really interesting things with one character in particular that leveled up this book even more for me.

Now, does this book, like the first one have infodumps, weird pacing decisions, and a steady stream of incredibly unwieldy sentences? Oh, yes. But they happen a degree less than they did in A Deadly Education, so if you're anything like me you'll be able to overlook them in favor of every other amazing thing going on. And I definitely did think of this book as amazing: it was hard for me to pull myself away from it, and I kept thinking about it when I wasn't reading it - a rarity.

If you've already tried this series you probably already know how you'll feel about it. If you haven't, and you're looking for some good, dark fantasy fun, look no further. This is it.

This was a great sequel to A Deadly Education. It was exciting and fun. It’s an exciting new point of view for a magic school, a great contrast to books like Vampire Academy and Harry Potter.

Free Netgalley book for review~ I stayed up way too late finishing this book. Gah. Just for that ending. And goodness knows when the next book will be published—I thought this was a duology.

It does drag a little bit in the middle, imo, with a fair bit of time spent on gym class, but it’s still entertaining.

If you liked the first book, this is a fun read but it ends in a MASSIVE CLIFFHANGER. So if you’re on the fence I’d recommend waiting until book 3 (???) shows up.

Naomi Novik builds such imaginative and captivating worlds, and The Last Graduate does an amazing job of plot continuation and world-building in this second book from her Schoolomance series. It is honestly a huge challenge to NOT get sucked into the pages or put this book down! I immensely enjoyed the growth and maturation of my favorite acerbic leading young lady, Galadriel. The Last Graduate is a phenomenal book. I cannot recommend this series enough!! I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to read this ARC.

So, seriously, my only complaint is that I have to wait for book three for HOW LONG?? I need to know how this is all going to go! Novik throws you right back into the action, no deep breaths, no nice long summer break for the students to relax and build up their strength. El's growth is exponential in The Last Graduate. She's still the same snarky, sarcastic girl you know and love, but she's letting that tough exterior shell crack enough to let in her new friends and maybe boyfriend. I really like the additional background offered for the Enclaves and how the home politics rules over nearly every aspect of students' school experience. All the action and relationships are deeper in this sequel, at one point it's practically frantic.

I did get a little bogged down about halfway through, I felt like there was maybe too much detail and exposition, but the further I got into the plot the more it all tied together. I needed all those details to truly appreciate the effort the seniors had to put forth and what ultimately was at stake. I thoroughly enjoyed this continuation and look forward to being able to get my greedy hands on book three!

This book captured me: hook, line, and sinker. I could not put it down for 2 days, trying to learn what happened to these poor, lucky, optimistic, broken students. It cannot be easy to write any kind of new magical school series in the shadow of Rowling, but this story is so hauntingly fresh that you won't find yourself too hung up comparing the scars of these endangered kids with a certain lightning bolt. This book did a good job of stretching the magic from book 1 without the system breaking down which is always a challenge. Additionally, the narration really did feel like being inside of the head of younger character, she is exceptional in her magic, but rather ordinary in terms of her maturity.. I can't wait to see where we go form here. (That cliffhanger was cruel though).

There was a lot of tell not show and retread in the beginning. But then...oh then. The book really took off and there was actual character growth and my MVP of familiars, Precious. The ending though. Literally still stuck with what the last ending meant so now I'm stuck with two cliffhangers that I actually need to understand. Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the ARC.

Sequels are hard, but this book took the themes of A Deadly Education and deepened them into what feels like a fully formed continuation of a story. I was caught up in this book very intensely and rooting so hard for El and her friends. However I did notice that there were a few rough parts here and there were El's internal monologue can go on for so long as to break up the conversation being portrayed.
That said I would highly recommend not reading this book until the third book in this trilogy is published. I won't say more than that, but trust me, wait to read this until you already have the final book in your hands, you will thank me.

Like all of Naomi Novak's books, The Last Graudate is compulsively readable and hard to put down. Book two continues consistently developing the world of the Scholomance and its inhabitants, as well as the themes of class division and global politics. A must read for fans of magic schools on the dark side; Vita Nostra meets The Call but completely unique in its own right. I cannot wait until the third book in this series.

** spoiler alert ** WTF I thought there were only two of these… cliffhanger! Ugh! So good though. I really love these characters and story, but that ending almost killed me.

The Last Graduate takes up where the first book left off, the 2nd year at the Scholomance. This year El is feeling so sure of her powers and skills that her fondness for the underdog leads her to the crazy notion - We'll save EVERYONE this year! And this is the seeming trajectory of the story, with the usual hiccups and demons and backstabbing along the way. The characters continue to develop - themselves and their relationships. El especially learns about this thing called Trust. And Friendship. She'd heard of them before, but..... Once again, the grand finale is graduation and Novik has a twist/cliffhanger that is leaving fans crazy. It left me annoyed, because (and I'm trying for no spoilers here) as I read El's plans, the subsequent actions are quite pointless. So arghh! Otherwise I found this great fun, completely dependent on the first book, excellent character development, but the plot not as involving as the first book. Highly recommended, looking forward to the third and a worthy explanation of that cliffhanger.

Last year, Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education introduced a complicated, dangerous world. In Novik's Earth, desperate parents fight for slots to the Scholomance school. At the Scholomance, if their magic-imbued children can learn skills to survive (and build the right alliances), they may live past graduation.

It's a harsh and unforgiving reality that forces children to adapt to combat conditions so they won't perish from the onslaught of "mals," demons hunting the precious mana carried by members of magic families. Survival rates are poor and the Scholomance is a long-shot hope, especially for those students from families outside the hard-to-join magic enclaves, homes to the rich and privileged members of the magic world.

The Scholomance school was built to be a refuge, for protecting the youth as they learned critical skills. In reality, it is running on fumes and barely operational. It does little to protect its students as mana-hunting monsters roam the halls, the duct system, the cafeteria, and even sneak into the bathrooms and dormitories. Unwary and unlucky students simply don't survive.

Galadriel "El" Higgins is a Wales-based schoolgirl raised by a loving mother. The two lived in a peace-and-love commune that failed to cherish her in any way. As a result, El is a prickly, snarky protagonist, who hesitates to connect with others. Deeply gifted, she's been rejected by nearly everyone she's encountered (outside her Mum) due to her unusual magic profile, which leans more naturally towards dark evil sorceress than happy fairy princess. Determined not to give into those natural inclinations, she is just as busy fending off the hoards of evil spells that fall into her hands as she is to learning basic survival.

Book 1 was a marvel. We first met El in her Junior year, where she tentatively formed her first friendships among her peers. She also established an intriguing relationship with the hunky and powerful Orion Lake, the school hero, who was busy saving, well, everyone.

Orion spent his time hunting the mals who, in turn, were busy killing students and harvesting their mana. At great personal risk, El and Orion helped the Senior class clear out the graduation hall, so they could escape the school and return home to the real world. Now, in the second book, it's the start of El and Orion's own Senior year and a cautionary message from El's mother hangs over their relationship.

Although you'd expect things to continue just as they left off, The Last Graduate starts surprisingly slowly. It takes nearly a quarter of the book before Orion even shows up in any meaningful way. I wondered at first whether Novik had lost the plot. However, once the first semester midterms pass, events begin to ramp up and the book takes off, meeting the quality and excellence of volume one and, perhaps, surpassing it in ever more surprising ways.

Like book 1, The Last Graduate is a deeply political book, although not tied directly to our reality. There was some controversy surrounding a few offhand references in the first book, which the author has taken great pains to remedy in book two. And, like the first book, The Last Graduate dives into the meaning of privilege and power, and explores what it means to be divested from structural institutional stability.

Without giving much away, there are quite a lot of seemingly false starts as the plot plays out. Certain grand goals fail to pay off. Over time those false starts become essential to Novik's tale. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone picking up book 2 so I'll just say that this progression picks up the central theme of the first book. It emphasizes that it's critical to create friendships and alliances, even in an atmosphere of fear. Reaching out to help those who cannot help themselves is a duty not just a way to self-aggrandize or make use of the desperate from a place of power. A philosophy of help and outreach must reach out to all, not just those closest to you. It's wonderful to explore this viewpoint without the book becoming overly preachy or pulling away from the core adventure.

That's not to say the book does not suffer from some flaws. Chief among these is the incomprehensible hostility from the Shanghai Enclave faction towards El, which creates some plot points that are necessary but built on shaky reasoning. Orion's near absence of character arc until near the end is also an issue, and when his story does pick up, it simplifies his motivations to such a degree that it feels flat compared to the complex, prickly, and wonderfully nuanced El.

All this, both good and bad (but mostly good), leads to an ending that will divide readers. Although the series could end here, as it mirrors history to some extent, it felt unsatisfying to me. I sincerely wish for a book 3 to bring the status quo to a new and more hopeful place.

In the end, outside of the slow start and a few rough patches, The Last Graduate is a tense, exciting rush of a story. Its untraditional lead sparkles and it delivers a feel-good heart-pumping adventure. Recommended.

An advanced-reader-copy was provided for me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Any follow-up to the highest of high bars set by A DEADLY EDUCATION (which was a masterpiece of evocative worldbuilding and complex character building with an archetypal Novik anti-heroine who draws readers in with a love-to-hate becoming a love-to-love in both funny small and huge moments and amazing adventures) would be in a place of a hard act to follow. THE LAST GRADUATE, being a bridge piece in the series, particularly felt like one where the author needed to establish a certain series of events to propel the story arc forward, and the action and adventure certainly did not suffer for it -- at no moment, can a reader feel bored of the events playing out. However, the driving force of the first book was anti-heroine El's emotional anger caused by isolation within the privileged system of the ivory tower hellhole that she's placed in (which rings especially true and has meaningful echoes of the privileged societies of higher and private education academia...). The second book takes place immediately after the events of the first book, and the emotional tone shift can feel a bit abrupt. Feeling intensely the emotional highs and lows of the character's evolution in the first book, THE LAST GRADUATE feels very removed in some ways from the original emotional drive of the main character, and so the emotional revelations needed to establish the events didn't ring quite as true for me, for instance El's evolution to caring and caretaking for other students not in her immediate friendship group in the complex surrounding of the Sholomance, or even further El's emotional developments in the main romantic attraction to Orion.

Typically speaking, this type of character emotional development without accompanying persuasive text (which might otherwise have brought the reader along with El's internal justifications and emotional reactions) would be a markdown of the book's readability and enjoyability. However, this just goes to show how excellent of a writer Novik truly is. Even in a follow-up piece that doesn't emotionally ring as true or deeply impactful as the original, the entertainment of world development and plot exposition is so wonderfully done, it doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the novel -- which is an amazingly rip-roaring good time in line with Novik's other top-line work. Given that A DEADLY EDUCATION felt like an entree in character development and worldbuilding for the highest levels of literary fantasy fiction writing (placing her up with Jacqueline Carey, Robin McKinley, Kristin Cashore), THE LAST GRADUATE feels a bit like a half step back to more high speed entertainment-oriented commercial fiction writing that Novik started from and that much of her recent work has evolved away from (UPROOTED was a particularly awesome entry for those fans of strong non-traditional female characters). One can only hope that future entries in the series will route back the deeply wrought complex emotional lines that felt a bit dangling or hanging in this second book.

Particularly, for my own personal experience as odd-man-out with an APA scholarship experience in private secondary schooling and feeling a deep kinship to the first book (especially prescient since I now have a young child we're debating about sending down a similar private school rabbithole), I'd hoped as a reader that this second book would explore more the opportunity of diverse developing worldbuilding sets in other cultures with secondary characters like Liu and Aadhya coming from such different backgrounds and worlds than the anti-heroine El's magical UK one. However, it seems that might be reserved for future development, as future entries look like they might be established in the outside world with El having (spoiler alert - look away!) 'graduated' with potentially high ambitions at the end of the appropriately titled LAST GRADUATE.

Overall, loved the excellent reading experience THE LAST GRADUATE provided, despite the detraction of the less than persuasive emotional follow-ups, and particularly loved the last cliffhanger ending related to the title. Cannot wait (fingers already twitching on the pre-order button whenever it arrives) to new entries in the series, particularly in development of the main characters' future and romantic entanglements as the series opens up to new worlds and opportunities outside of the domain of the Sholomance -- of course with the hugely rippling effects of what happens in the end to the Sholomance itself. Cannot recommend enough this book and this series in particular to others. If you have not read this yet, buy this book and read A DEADLY EDUCATION first, then buy the next one.

I'm currently still recovering from an absolute banger ending, but I will say that the book overall is a bit mixed. The pacing, especially in the beginning, can get bogged down by entirely too many asides. These can be a trying when it's in the middle of a scene that otherwise showed promise of going somewhere. Since I was already familiar with the world, it felt like things were less fresh in places. I will say I was VERY pleased that the book stayed true to being a lot about the friendships (confirmed found family yesssss), and didn't just become some weird romantic drama. Which is not to say Orion isn't here, he's just the part I care about the least and I'm glad he doesn't dominate the narrative. Anyway! Once we hit the main plot, things got a lot stronger, and I appreciated some of the twists. It did feel a little condensed and I would've liked more dialogue and less El summarizing, but I do appreciate her voice overall so it worked. I certainly couldn't put the book down for the last bit and the ending made me overcome with emotions. This is a book about a grim world where people can be less shitty and help each other! I'm about it! I'm especially interested to see the external world politics in a future book.

I'm not an expert on all of the details, but I do think some of the world building is a little shaky here still. For instance, why is it that the London enclave had the power to make a school but the Shanghai enclave didn't. Is it linked to colonialism? The theft of resources? I have so many questions about how the politics and history outside wizard enclaves affects they way they interact with each other currently. For instance, there are specifically a lot of language politics that would go into the idea that Mandarin Chinese is the only language other than English that one can take all of one's classes in. (I assume that is the dialect she means when she says Chinese, as it appears to be what she's speaking in the the one line she has written out in pinyin.) I'm not saying all of them need to be touched on in the book, I just want to know that the author has taken them into consideration. There were some shaky details about Chinese as a language in the book that made me a little wary, but perhaps they are just editing issues that will be resolved in the print book. I'm willing to hold judgement and am very excited to read the next book