I'm completely unwell due to this series. It made me feel so many things, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Naomi Novik really stuck the landing with this one-- this book was an excellent end to an amazing trilogy.

El is such an amazing, complex character that I rooted for so hard. I loved her exploring who she was, and also learning more about her family and the world outside of the Scholomance. All other side characters were terrific as well, but no one holds a candle to El (except maybe Orion, but he was less present in this book than previous books).

Even though this book is set in a magical world, the author somehow managed to make it feel like these were real people and the problems that El faced felt like things that could happen in reality. How so many things in this world are done out of fear and selfishness, felt almost too real.

I cannot say enough good things about this book/series, but it is definitely one of my top reads of the year.

Thanks to Netgalley and Del Rey for this ARC!!! I hope we have something special coming about The Scholomance trilogy and that's why these are back on Netgalley!!! 👀

Incredibly satisfying ending to one of my all-time favourite series. It delivered in all the ways I hoped and thought it would, and still managed to sneak in a few surprises for me too.

<3

*Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.*

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for the eARC!

Boy, this book. 🤯 4.5 stars.
Absolutely blown away by some reveals. What an ending for the trilogy!

It was so strange to go into the real world after spending two years in the Scholomance.
El shone so brightly in the entire trilogy. And I support all of her choices in book 3. Yes, you know what I'm talking about, we're not shaming *WOMEN* for these types of choices in the 21st century. Honestly people. Her wit and humor were everything and I laughed out loud several times during this book.

I would've loved a little less repeating of the things we've heard in the same book or previous books. That's my only complaint.

Otherwise, Miss Novik delivers. Always. I am yet to read her book I dislike. I am going to miss El.

I absolutely adore this whole series and wish I could read it all again for the first time. The Golden Enclaves was the perfect ending!

A solid ending to a great series. Everything really does come together in a way that feels right, with some standout character moments and shocking reveals that kept me turning the pages way later than I should have been.

Naomi Novik fans will be well pleased with this final installment.

A lackluster ending to a great series. I absolutely loved the first two books in this series, but alas, I felt let down by this finale.

An outstanding conclusion to the trilogy. Novik once again reminds us why she is at the pinnacle of her craft. Foreshadowing from earlier works are neatly tied in.

Just superb on every level.

The first thing you need to know about this review going in is that I had spoiled everything (or so I thought) about this book before I read it and I was furious that Novik was going to wreck what might be my all time favorite series. I knew about (view spoiler) and I was not okay with it. I knew about the ending and how (view spoiler) and had decided that maybe that would be okay but I wasn't thrilled. I honestly dreaded starting this book. I thought there was no way any of that would work.

But it did. It worked amazingly well. And I don't know how the heck Novik did it.

This is not a perfect book, the pacing in some spots is slow and others too fast. Lots of our favorite characters are basically missing and I wish we got to know more about some of the new ones. This all makes sense when you realize that originally The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves were one book and she had to split it or it'd be too long. So some padding was expected. That being said, I think Chloe deserved a better edit than she got. She was barely in the book at all. I would have loved to see her switch places with Liesel ( minus the relationship bit).

*** General Spoilers Below ***

(view spoiler)

*** End Spoilers ***

The themes in this whole trilogy, but especially this book, are powerful and, at times, difficult. Novik does a wonderful job weaving both the horror of the world and of people's selfishness with the idea of hope and how one person can be that ripple in the pond that leads to change. El is wonderfully real in ways a lot of authors just can't do and this is a 4.5/5 star read that you should definitely dive into.

Also, if you're a fan of audio books, I can't recommend this one narrated by Anisha Dadia enough. She is the most perfect El.

A very enjoyable conclusion to this series. As with the previous installments, if you don’t like a chatty narrator and extensive seat-of-the-pants worldbuilding, this may not be the book for you, but I personally had a great time. I wish we had gotten more time with Aadhya and Liu, though.

Not sure why I received this like, 10 months after it released but here we are! I had preordered it to read immediately because I was so hooked after the end of book 2!
This is a solid conclusion to the trilogy and I really enjoyed how everything came together. Little hints all the way from book one now came to fruition and it was so fun to see it play out.
I also loved El's development as a character and she really shines in this book!
Overall I gave the series 4 stars as a whole!

I just really, really enjoyed reading this book.

Naomi Novik is an auto-buy author for me and has been since I purchased A Deadly Education somewhat impulsively. This book is a gorgeous ending to a series that had me reading and rereading the first two. I loved the way small details in Deadly Education paid off here. I loved the horrible price of the enclaves. I loved the ongoing critique of global capitalism.

There were a couple of places I was not as delighted with book three as I was with books 1 and 2. The world outside the smothering prison of the Scholmomance was almost too wide. I felt like the book bounced around from one location to another which left some places a little shallow and the intensity of the first two felt lessened. I also wasn't crazy about Liesel's role. The more explicit bi-sexuality (though certainly foreshadowed earlier in the trilogy) seemed tacked on.

That said, the resolution of the prophecy was glorious with all the horrible inevitability of the best Greek tragedy and I would recommend this series to anyone who likes fantasy and/or dark academia.

The Golden Enclaves is extremely easy to spoil and extremely difficult to discuss without spoilers. Most of the twists and revelations (and there are a lot of them) start at around the 33% mark and then keep coming, one after another, almost until the very end of the book. For that reason we’ve decided to run our discussion in two parts. Part I, this one, is spoiler-free and touches on only a little of the plot. Part II, running tomorrow, is a spoiler-filled discussion from start to finish. We ask that you contribute to the comment threads in this same spirit—keep this one spoiler-free and discuss anything you want to in tomorrow’s thread.

The Golden Enclaves is a departure in that it takes place in the outside world. El has graduated, but Orion has not—he stayed behind to fight off the world’s most terrifying maw-mouth, Patience, and protect the world from its hunger, and shoved El out the doors after telling her how much he loved her.

El appears in a meadow in Wales, where her mum is waiting with a bouquet of flowers. But El shows up hollering for Orion, screaming for him. In desperation, she tries a summoning spell that fails, then finds a small puddle to scry Orion in. She even kills some of the lives within Fortitude, the giant maw-mouth Patience consumed, through the puddle, but when she reaches in for Orion, he shoves her away again and cuts off the flow of mana to her power sharer. She uses her remaining power moments later for a spell to tell if his heart is still beating. But she gets nothing after several tries and is faced with the devastating truth that Orion is gone.

When El asked Gwen why she warned her away from Orion, Gwen says that she sensed overwhelming hunger in him and it made her terrified for El. It angers and hurts El.

El spends the next few days in a fog. After years of longing for freedom, she can’t enjoy the outside world. Gwen even catches her absent-mindedly creating a spell to alter reality and make it so Orion isn’t dead. Gwen grabs it and tosses it into the fire before it backfires and kills El and others.

Jennie: This part made me wonder how disorienting reentry into the regular would be for Scholomance students, even without the additional trauma that El experienced.

Janine: Great point. After that, El turns to her beloved Golden Stone sutras for comfort. But when Gwen realizes what El’s reading, she collapses in anguish and El can do nothing for her.

Gwen manages to push out words—an apology to El for all she’s ever suffered. When she and Arjun (El’s father) were Scholomance students, they summoned the sutras, she explains. Enclaves are built on malia, on some deliberate horror enacted in the world. You can feel it inside the enclave if you let yourself, Gwen says. But the Golden Stone enclaves were different, and she and Arjun wanted to spread that better, kinder path, only the spells for building them were lost. So they summoned them—and agreed in advance to pay any and all necessary costs.

They thought it hadn’t worked, not that the sutras would be given to their child in return. Neither of them guessed that Arjun would pay by being taken into a maw-mouth, where existence is an unending, inescapable torment.

Gwen and Arjun also didn’t know Gwen was pregnant, that they were offering their child as a sacrifice. A horrific toll has been extracted from El, who’s known rejection and cruelty all her life. Arjun’s family tried to kill after her great-great-grandmother prophesied that she would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves. Everyone—from adults to peers, acquaintances to strangers—recoils from El when they meet her. And now her payment includes Orion’s unending suffering.

Jennie: This was probably the first devastating revelation in a book full of devastating revelations. I had not guessed that El’s parents would have any connection to the sutras.

Janine: Me neither.

Jennie: I would almost like to have a prequel dealing with Gwen and Arjun’s time in the Scholomance, but I really can’t bring myself to read prequels where I know a likable character – which I’m assuming Arjun would be – dies.

Janine: Yes. That would be a great story but also a tragic one.

El has difficulty processing Gwen’s revelation and asks for time to think. But when Gwen goes off to their commune’s shower to give her space, Liesel shows up.

Readers of The Last Graduate may recall that at the Scholomance Liesel was instrumental in helping El, Orion, and El’s other friends free the other kids; she used her brilliance to calculate how to optimize everything. But El disliked Liesel’s willingness to do just about anything to get admitted to an enclave. Liesel also tried to kill El once (to her credit, she changed her mind soon enough to save El from her trap).

Jennie: I really love Liesel to an unreasonable degree. It felt like the book really started when she showed up – she is a great foil to El.

Janine: Hmm, for me the book started with Gwen’s revelation and took off in a big way later, when El decided to on and set out to New York (more on that in a minute). But re Liesel—I didn’t love her in the last book but oh how Novik changed my mind about that! For me she was the unsung heroine of this book (we’ll talk about her in tomorrow’s post).

To get back to the story, the attacks on enclaves have continued; Salta enclave, like Bangkok, was recently destroyed. London has survived but just barely. Its wards have weakened and a big maw-mouth broke through. Liesel demands El come and kill the maw-mouth. El is annoyed but Sarah and Alfie (now Liesel’s boyfriend) also beg El to help. The maw-mouth has consumed many London enclavers and if El doesn’t kill it, Alfie’s father will fight it and likely be the next to get eaten. El goes with them and killing the maw-mouth turns out to be easier than she expects.

Jennie: The killing of this, her third (I think?) maw-mouth, felt a little anticlimactic to me, but later it made sense in context. (Though I also wonder if her technique would work on other nasties?)

Janine: I wanted it to be just a little bit harder than it was, too, but there probably wasn’t room to fit in a slower progression to her ultimate skill level at killing maw-mouths.

Afterward, Liesel invites El to dinner and reveals that her ambitions aren’t as mercenary as they seem. Liesel extends El an offer: she’ll convince the enclavers to fund El’s Golden Stone project if El agrees to guarantee their safety from maw-mouths. But El turns her down. She knows that if she’s forced to make nice with enclavers she’s liable to lose her temper and wipe them off the face of the earth.

Soon, the enclave’s leader tries to seize control of El by putting her under a compulsion. With Liesel’s help and that of a woman named Yancy, one of a gang of wizards who mooch off the enclave, El escapes. Yancy guides them out through an old section of the enclave that is halfway in the void and shouldn’t exist. It’s easy to die there, since to disbelieve in its unlikely presence—London enclavers destroyed it long ago—is to end it. But they make it out okay.

Jennie: This bit dragged a little for me, I think in part because I was working to understand the slightly different part of the wizard world that Novik describes here.

Janine: Yes, good point. It did. For me with the exceptions of the actual confrontation with the maw-mouth and the dinner conversation with Liesel, the entire section between El’s departure from the commune and her arrival at the airport (see further down) felt slow relative to the rest of the book. Events came fast and furious in the second half. I’ve seen readers say they wanted more downtime in the second half, but things were dire enough that I just wanted El to confront the obstacles. Nevertheless I loved the breathing room scenes we did get.

Jennie: Yeah, I kind of think the second half had to be as action-packed as it was.

Janine: To get back to the plot, the walk through the partly-demolished area of the enclave makes El realize that if this part of the enclave has lingered past its destruction, so might the Scholomance and Patience. If so, then unless El finds a way back into the school and kills Patience, Orion will suffer forever.

So El has to travel to New York and ask Orion’s powerful parents for the necessary mana. Liesel attaches herself to El—she has an ulterior motive and El needs support, so El lets her. They meet up with Aadhya in New Jersey and she joins them. But what they find in Orion’s home and later on is nothing they anticipated.

The Golden Enclaves is a journey, both literally (every chapter is named after a different location where it takes place) and figuratively—a personal odyssey to end Orion’s suffering, and a growth journey for El and her world. It was also a journey for me because so many things are reframed and the picture of El’s world is so much more complete by the end. I had to let go of some preconceptions, definitely.

Jennie: It really upended many of my beliefs and assumptions from the previous two books.

Janine: This book does that very thoroughly. I read it twice to help me make up my mind about it. The first time I was overwhelmed by how dark much of it was. The snarky humor that infused the earlier books is a lot less present here. Since El is in a lot of emotional pain and she’s the narrator that’s appropriate, but it’s still a significant tonal shift. And (without speaking to whether or not there’s a happy ending) just when I thought things couldn’t get darker, they did, more than once.

After reaching the end, I needed more of an epilogue to allow me to recover some. There were a lot of loose ends left dangling, too. But there were also wonderful grace notes in this book: people pulling together, reunions and fulfilled promises, gentle kindness and support.

Jennie: I would not have minded an epilogue, either. Partly because there were just really unsettling moments that happened very near the end, which kind of leads a bit of a hangover for me as a reader. It’s not that the ending was rushed, but having the really bad stuff so near the end leaves a strong impression even if the end is different (if that makes any sense).

Janine: I agree on the last. But I do think the wrap up was rushed, in terms of my needing things explained a bit better and wanting to see some loose threads tied up. I’m not one of the readers who likes everything in a tidy bow and I wouldn’t want that here, but I wanted a little more.

I’m in awe of what Novik has accomplished, though. Many of the seeds that were planted in A Deadly Education come to fruition so beautifully in this book. El’s conflict with the enclaves, her history of being rejected, her friendship with and love for Orion, Orion’s quirks, El’s tight group of friends, the school, the maw-mouths, Gwen’s backstory, and the prophecy all come together brilliantly.

Jennie: Agree. I could probably stand to reread (and I’m not a rereader) just to make sure I’ve caught everything.

Janine: I had a contradictory reaction of being blown away while feeling weighed down by so much darkness, but then I found myself going back and rereading the moments of hope and light, the times people supported or thanked or showed love to El or just plain showed up when she needed them. I read these over and over until pretty soon I had reread half the book.

Jennie: I think what struck me was how morally ambiguous so many of the characters were. A lot of them were either making the best choice they could out of bad choices, or (less forgivably, but understandably) turning a blind eye to the bad things others did to keep them safe.

Janine: Yes. Novik is very careful to hold the system accountable at least as much as a handful of individuals. El touches on the complexity of the situation; people want their kids safe, and then they want their homes to be more comfortable, and then luxurious… it’s a slippery slope of injustice, just like in the real world. And most enclavers may know that there’s some bad stuff happening to make their comfortable lives possible, but they don’t know how bad.

After rereading my favorite parts, I decided to reread the whole thing to figure what my final verdict would be. The second time I liked enjoyed the book substantially more. The first time my preconceived notions (based on the earlier books) got in the way of my enjoyment, but the second time I just let myself fall fully into the pleasure of reading it and appreciating it for what it is, and not judging it by how it fit or didn’t fit my expectations.

(I don’t feel that the gaps between what I expected and what the book held were inconsistencies at all. They were hinted at in the earlier books and made perfect sense when they happened.)

The Golden Enclaves is quite good. Really, really good. There are so many payoffs, and I loved getting to meet characters we’d only heard about off page. Gwen, of course, but several others too. There are horrible things going on in El’s world, at first behind a curtain El can’t see through. She and we can nevertheless sense that the enclaves are powered by awful acts. The more that curtain was pulled open, the harder it was for me to bear, but at the same time the plot and the worldbuilding are so well constructed and everything made so much sense within the context of the world.

Jennie: The trilogy feels heavily allegorical taken as a whole. The world Novik creates is a microcosm of our own, with the division between the haves and the have nots, and (not to overstate it) the banality of evil.

Janine: On Goodreads many readers love this book but a few hold something against El, and we can get into that in tomorrow’s discussion. Without revealing spoilers, I can say that though El becomes a more complex person here (part of growing up), I still love her.

Jennie: I have mixed feelings about that and am eager to discuss it. I both have judgment and judgment about other people having judgment.

Janine: LOL. I can’t wait! I’m going to close here with my grade, which falls short of an A mainly because of my feeling that more of an epilogue would have been good both for my reading pleasure and to tie up loose threads. I’m giving The Golden Enclaves a B+/A-. What about you, Jennie?

Jennie: It’s another A- for me; I can’t give it a lesser grade than the first two books. I can’t even really rank them at this point because they are both distinct from each other and also, kind of a seamless whole.

The Golden Enclaves and the entire Scholomance series have been a long dark road full of twists and turns. What started as a run-of-the-mill dark academia story pushed and expanded past the bounds of the genre and became a gripping grimdark story with a morally gray heroine that you may not like, but you can certainly get behind. Because while the story has solid side characters, especially in The Golden Enclaves, the journey is that of Galadriel, or El as she likes to be called. El, could be a dark sorcerous who can make mountains bow before her, and all mothers of the world cry out in weeping anguish. To quote the original Galadriel, "Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!"

That is, if she chooses to go down that path, which is the crux of the story and her nagging fear.

The Golden Enclaves starts out just as we left off, with El and company having fought a host of maleficaria hell-bent on their destruction. El released her power and a spell that could crack the Earth if she chose to. Instead, it split the Scholomance dimension off this plane, and hopefully all the demons with it. Did it work? As the book blurb can attest, sorta. "Ha, only joking! Actually it's gone all wrong. Someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in my stead, and probably everyone we saved is about to get killed in the brewing enclave war on the horizon. And the first thing I've got to do now, having miraculously got out of the Scholomance, is turn straight around and find a way back in."

El is out of the immediate danger of Scholomance but has been thrust into an entirely different sort of danger, that of intrigue and guile. As she puts it, "my own personal trolly problem to solve." This is where her friends and supporting characters truly shine. El might be unimaginably powerful, but she sucks when it comes to people. She has had to have a wall of outright unapproachability to protect others. "My anger's a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time."

Her having to play nice with the different enclaves to achieve a single goal is very new. And this is where Liesel, of all people, steps in. We met Liesel in earlier books. Liesel is a social climber and so practical in her approach to things it skirts being robotic. She sees angles in everything and, in her blatant practicality, is immune to all of El's "charms." Because only the outcome matters, she is the embodiment of all El has hated her entire life. But El discovers that while Liesel's nature is of brutal practicality is offputting; she has developed it to survive, much like El has developed her cantankerous shell. As much as El hates it, they have a lot of similarities. The first and foremost is surviving Enclave life.

Plotwise, The Golden Enclaves is not the type of book one can talk about without ruining it. But I can tell you that The Golden Enclaves soars to the finale. It is a mile-a-minute story where every page is revelatory, and things can and do change from chapter to chapter. Instead of crashing at the end of this series as many authors do, their stories spent and the characters tired, Novik soars and rages. Her characters felt like they were just getting started. I loved The Golden Enclaves and am so glad I took the journey through Scholomance with Novik. It was a hell of a ride.

Our Recommended Read review of The Golden Enclaves ran on October 6th.

"The Golden Enclaves is extremely easy to spoil and extremely difficult to discuss without spoilers. Most of the twists and revelations (and there are a lot of them) start at around the 33% mark and then keep coming, one after another, almost until the very end of the book. For that reason we’ve decided to run our discussion in two parts. Part I, this one, is spoiler-free and touches on only a little of the plot. Part II, running tomorrow, is a spoiler-filled discussion from start to finish. We ask that you contribute to the comment threads in this same spirit—keep this one spoiler-free and discuss anything you want to in tomorrow’s thread.

The Golden Enclaves is a departure in that it takes place in the outside world. El has graduated, but Orion has not—he stayed behind to fight off the world’s most terrifying maw-mouth, Patience, and protect the world from its hunger, and shoved El out the doors after telling her how much he loved her.

El appears in a meadow in Wales, where her mum is waiting with a bouquet of flowers. But El shows up hollering for Orion, screaming for him. In desperation, she tries a summoning spell that fails, then finds a small puddle to scry Orion in. She even kills some of the lives within Fortitude, the giant maw-mouth Patience consumed, through the puddle, but when she reaches in for Orion, he shoves her away again and cuts off the flow of mana to her power sharer. She uses her remaining power moments later for a spell to tell if his heart is still beating. But she gets nothing after several tries and is faced with the devastating truth that Orion is gone."

This is a partial review. The complete (and spoiler-free) review can be found here:

https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/b-plus-reviews/joint-review-part-i-spoiler-free-the-golden-enclaves-by-naomi-novik/

We also had a separate discussion post the next day, and the conversation in that comment thread lasted a full week. This one does contain spoilers:

https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/joint-discussion-with-spoilers-the-golden-enclaves-by-naomi-novik/

Absolutely perfect ending to a trilogy, one of the best I've read for sure. Better than the first and second, actually.

Novik starts the third installment of the Scholomance series immediately after the events of The Last Graduate. El is reunited with her mother who reveals a family secret, but she barely has time to come to terms with Orion before Liesel swoops in with news of the London enclave. Soon El has to put her pain aside to pursue what is attacking the enclaves.

As hinted in the other books, this book continues the theme of working together, coming to a point of acceptance, and healing. While the overall arc of the series is unique and the world building fascinating, the conclusion of the series missed a few marks for me. At times I found myself a little confused by El's actions. While I didn't mind the direction of El and Liesel, I think at times it would have been better executed if there was a bit foreshadowing in the previous books. The reunion with El's mother, Gwen, is short lived and her role in the story is bare minimum. As she played a big role in El's memories through the other books, I had hoped to see a bit more of her. That being said, I liked the reunions between El and her classmates. The pacing of the story was good. In previous books, the pacing was a bit slower. There is a bit of info dumping at times, but I think this improves the pacing. The story does get a bit heavy at times, but this is not unusual given the rest of the books. And while the ending was not quite what I expected, overall The Golden Enclave is a solid read.

This was the perfect ending to this trilogy. The students are out of the Scholomance, and now they're dealing with the world at large, which is, as it turns out, still very much influenced by what happened in the Scholomance. We get to see them in a bunch of different locales, and there are some revelations that are jaw-dropping, yet absolutely believable based on what we've learned in the 2 previous books.

The book does a good job of tying up loose ends and answering questions, even as it poses new ones. It really is excellently written. Great characters, amazing world-building (in some cases, literally), and just overall a satisfying book.

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik finishes off the Scholomance trilogy. Graduation day has come and gone, El is safely back home with her mother, and all the children of the Scholomance escaped safely – except Orion. Before El can begin processing that loss, she’s thrown into the chaos caused by a mystery person destroying enclaves. To stave off a brewing enclave war, El will have to uncover the secrets underpinning the enclave system and confront the destiny foretold for her. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing an eARC in exchange for a review.

A warning – the overall emotional impact of this book was painful, so be prepared to have your heart comprehensively stomped on as you empathize with the characters. I love the way Novik plays with power and the underlying principles of the magic system she created for this series. Finally seeing the enclaves and the horrifying trades enclavers make for safety and power, and the way this world works for people after they leave school was fascinating and we get to see more from characters who were bit players in previous books. The only minor irritant was the pacing, as the book starts off slow with El slogging through her grief, then picks up halfway through, hitting a pace that makes the ending feel oddly rushed. Towards the end, I was eying the dwindling page count and worrying about the story’s ability to wrap up in the remaining space, but it pulls through. Overall, The Golden Enclaves is a compelling resolution to the story begun in A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate and I highly recommend the series as a whole.

First line: The last thing Orion said to me, the absolute bastard, was El, I love you so much.

Summary: All the students of the Scholomance have been saved. El and Orion’s plan worked perfectly except Orion stayed behind in order to destroy the mawmouth, Patience. El is distraught that she left Orion inside the school to die but there are even bigger problems now. Several enclaves have been attacked and destroyed and no one knows how or why. Since El is the only one to have faced a mawmouth and survived she is called upon to help. And as she travels to the different enclaves she learns more about the dark history behind them while also giving her an idea on how to save the future of the wizard world before it destroys itself.

My Thoughts: It took me a while to decide how I felt about this book. I was very happy to jump back into El’s world but I was very sad to not be at the Scholomance anymore. I missed this dynamic of the story where there was a deadly mal hiding behind every corner and the chance of making it to breakfast was always questionable. Life on the outside was not nearly as exciting.

I did enjoy the story and found the secrets that were revealed rather shocking but it just seemed to be dragging out rather than the fast paced magical adventures of the first book. It needs to be read to complete the story but it was a three star read for me.

Rounding up for the overall quality of the series. This isn’t got be for everyone. It’s dark, it’s grim, it’s kind of depressing. If slaughtered children will distress you too much this is a series you should stay far far away from.
However with that said it’s well written and holds out just enough hope to keep you turning pages. A single candle on a wet night with your hand cupped over the flame’s worth of hope… sure it’s a magic school series but the magic mostly involves nightmares and bad choices. Very entertaining page turner of a series though for all its grimness.