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.

I loved every word of this book and I’m so sad the series is over. It was so fun to be back with El and Orion and they were in for quite an adventure. I already can’t wait reread this one.

When we last left this series I was irate, because Novik had previously said this series was a duology and then THAT CLIFFHANGER! How dare! I thought the series was over and that I was going to have to throw the book against the wall.
This book makes up for that. Mostly.
The pacing of this book is pretty good, especially considering that it would feel out of place if there weren’t at least a BIT of moping after the events of book 2. The magic system starts to go a bit sideways in a way that felt a little convenient to me. But overall this is the conclusion that the series deserves. We see El figure out who she actually is and what she’s willing to fight for, when she (ingenuously) told us in the first book the answers to those questions were 1) she was an evil being and 2) nothing but her own survival was really worth fighting for.
Casual bi representation (sure to anger some and delight others)!

People are going to buy this book regardless so the only real question here is, will she stick the landing? And the answer is yes, she totally does. Love this trilogy and can't wait for it to be out so I can talk about it without spoilers!

Thank you so much to Del Rey Books for providing an ARC so that I might write this The Golden Enclaves review!

As I said in my review of A Deadly Education, I was pleasantly surprised and had my socks knocked off by this amazing series.

As soon as I finished The Last Graduate, I knew I needed The Golden Enclaves immediately. Thankfully, it was releasing in less than 2 months so acquiring an ARC was possible and I jumped straight into it.

There was a huge cliffhanger at the end of The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves picks up immediately where it left off.

A Deadly Education was touted to me as a darker Harry Potter, and now that the series is complete, I can confirm that it is as good as Harry Potter and better in every imaginable way.

The Golden Enclaves Review

I have to tell you, I was concerned going into The Golden Enclaves.

I don’t usually read other people’s reviews before reading a book, but I wanted to know if anyone else had gotten an ARC yet. The one I came across was a 2-star, which made me nervous.

Without reading the spoiler section, I saw them say the conclusion to a beloved series was disappointing.

I’m happy to tell you that is absolutely not the case. The Golden Enclaves is a breathtaking, whirlwind adventure that exceeded my expectations in every possible area, with the exception of one.

I’ll share my one disappointment in a spoiler section below. For now, this review of The Golden Enclaves is spoiler-free.

The Plot

As you can imagine from the title, the main focus of the book is really about El taking her sutras and building Golden Enclaves just as she’s always dreamed. However, she isn’t do it the way she wants.

As soon as she escapes the Scholomance, she discovers that the evil malificer attacking enclaves has struck again, and this time London is falling apart. Liesl contacts El for help when the weakened enclave comes under attack from a maw-mouth.

And so starts a string her swooping in to save failing enclaves as more come under attack from the mysterious evil-doer.

The Golden Enclaves is Full of Surprises

One of the great joys I find from reading is guessing things. I like to anticipate the plot twists and character motivations and predict what’s going to happen.

Most of the time I’m right. I’ve written a few books myself, and my brain is hardwired to dissect a story and understand plot devices.

So when I say The Golden Enclaves completely floored me, I want you to understand how massive a deal that is.

In both of the previous books, I was so engrossed in the story that I had no predictions whatsoever.

The characters and events just carried me along, and all the while Naomi Novik was laying the groundwork for the most ultimate of plot twists in The Golden Enclaves.

I didn’t even know she was doing it to me!

The realization that hit me about a full 60 pages before El towards the end of The Golden Enclaves was like a Mac truck hitting me at 75 miles and hour.

As soon as the theory formed in my brain, I scoured my mind for hints of it throughout the previous two books and they were there!

It’s a rare author that knows where Book 3 is going before they event start Book 1. Only two other authors I know are capable of such deep foreshadowing: Brandon Sanderson and J.K. Rowling.

I haven’t felt the emotion that washed over me upon my understanding of this crucial moment since Harry Potter.

The Golden Enclaves Spoiler Section

What Happened to Orion?

The Last Graduate left us with Orion shoving El out of the Scholomance and staying inside all by himself.

So as you can imagine, a significant portion of The Golden Enclaves is devoted to getting back to Orion.

Of course, when El left, Orion was staring down the maw-mouth Patience. And considering the only one capable of defeating a maw-mouth is El, she rightly assumes he’s dead.

So El’s goal is not to save Orion, but rather to kill Patience and end Orion’s suffering.

During this time, Liesl hooks up with El and in a moment of frazzled stress, El and Liesl have sex in an extra-dimensional space at Heathrow airport while waiting for a flight to New York.

What!?!

Okay, this was a shock to the system. Orion’s last words to El were “I love you,” and this occurred not 7-10 days earlier. Most of that time she spent bawling her eyes out.

Fastest rebound ever.

The Twisted Romance

Okay, okay. She believes that Orion is dead.

But about halfway through the book, they rescue Orion because, surprise (or not), he’s not dead. He managed to kill every single mal in the Scholomance, including Patience.

A few pages later, she’s having “I missed you” sex with Orion in the Woods near her yurt in Wales.

The real moment of anger about The Golden Enclaves’ romance comes a few chapters later when El once again has sex with Liesl. This time on an airplane.

Some may call me old fashioned, but this seems like a blatant disregard for the sanctity of a relationship between two people. In other words, she cheated on him.

I can excuse the first time.

She thought he was dead…

…but he’s not.

I just felt that this plot point was totally and completely unnecessary. The only purpose it served, as far as I could tell, was to endear Liesl to El so that El would accept her help, without which she would have be unable to save Orion.

Besides that, Liesl plays absolutely no further part in the story. Sure, she’s there, but she’s not necessary. She doesn’t do anything crucial. Nothing that needs her to have had sex with El, twice, anyway.

Oh, and did I mention that Orion is basically a shell of his former self the whole book. Or should I saw for like a quarter of the book, because Orion is absent for the entire first half and missing (or zombified) a good chunk of the second half, too.

The End of the Romance

Orion never finds out about Liesl, and that doesn’t really seem to matter because the ending of The Golden Enclaves makes it very clear that Orion is staying in the fixed Scholomance as a protector of the children for all time.

I liken this to Will Turner being aboard the Dutchman while Elizabeth Swan is forced to only see him on certain days of the year where he can come on land.

Because that’s exactly the deal El and Orion make.

El is going to travel the world fighting maw-mouths with her ragtag band of heroes, and the only time she and Orion will see each other is between school terms, which apparently will be a thing now.

That’s it.

The End.

The end of the book, and the end of their romance.

It’s a satisfactory book ending, as book endings go. We have a vision of the future and can imagine it ourselves.

But the lack of a Happily Ever After somewhat puts a damper on the mood of an otherwise fantastic book.

Final Thoughts on The Golden Enclaves (Spoiler-Free)

The Golden Enclaves is action-packed from cover to cover. I had a hard time putting this down, and certainly didn’t want to.

El is an exquisitely fantastic character as always. The witticisms are as great as ever and I just love being in her head.

While The Golden Enclaves lacks any sort of massive world-ending battle like we saw in The Last Graduate, the stakes are no less intense and the story absolutely amazing.

The plot twist, or revelation, is one of the greatest I can remember reading in recent years, and instantly catapulted The Scholomance to my top 5 series of all time.

I rated the previous two books 5 out of 5 stars without hesitation, and unfortunately I couldn’t do the same her despite all the good things I’ve said (check out the spoiler section).

I have to knock off a star for the way the romance was handled in this book.

The Golden Enclaves receives 4 out of 5 stars for me.

The Golden Enclaves is the final book of the Scholomance trilogy and I'm glad to be able to say that it is just as wonderful and satisfying as I hoped that it would be. It begins directly after the end of The Last Graduate, with El trying (and mostly failing) to process graduation. The first part of the book moves a bit slowly because of this, as El definitely has issues and spends a lot of time being depressed and angry. However, once the action starts to move the book is pretty much perfect and offers some amazing bits of world building that pull the entire series together. Here we finally get the full story behind enclaves and the world power structure of the magic users, as well as resolution for El and her friends (also, I kind of love Liesel now, she was awesome in this book).

I really don't want to say too much here because the book is better experienced on your own. I will say that when I finished The Golden Enclaves I immediately picked up my copy of the first book in the trilogy so that I could read it again. This is a truly fantastic trilogy, and one of the best things about it is that it's all about choosing to be kind in a world where it would be so simple to choose the easy option. Over and over again El chooses kindness over selfishness, and through her struggle she slowly begins to convince others to do the same. She shows them that there is another choice. I love that these books don't act as if kindness is easy. El struggles constantly when it would be so easy to give in, and it makes her story wonderful to read. With this trilogy Naomi Novik has really cemented herself as a must read for me. I'm sorry that this series is over, only because it was so wonderful. I can't wait to see what Novik does next.

Really fantastic final entry in this amazing series. The character arcs end quite tidily, but maybe at the expense of some bigger drama? The late-game villain fizzles out as the very end gets maaaaaaybe a little too kumbaya for my taste. I mean, I still cried cathartically!! All I want is for El to be happy!!!

I'm really excited to read this series back to back, without the agony of The Last Graduate's cliffhanger.

I have already read the first two books in this series, and have loved them and everything else Naomi Novik has ever written, but I was wondering how the author would handle this volume, AFTER graduation, and what on earth she would have the longsuffering El DO.
I didn't need to worry. This was a great trilogy ender (although if there are more El stories coming I will totally read them!)
I think Novik kept the excitement and pace up perfectly as the graduating class tries to clean up the mess the elders have made. I love these characters and really enjoyed more time with them.
Excited to get this for our library and promote the series as my favorite of the recent surge in "dark academia." This appeals to both longtime SFF readers and teens and newcomers and I am thrilled the book was so good.