A Deadly Education plot summary

Welcome to the Scholomance. You’ll learn fast here, or you’ll die trying. Or you’ll learn fast and die anyway. There are no promises of graduation, something that El is all too aware of. She’s not exactly adept at making friends, so alliances are proving tricky to come by. And while her natural gift for destruction could be a boon against the dark monsters that roam the corridors, it could just as easily tear through all her fellow students. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, resident hero Orion Lake seems to be making a habit of saving El’s life. Gross.

Content warnings

• Assault
• Murder
• Gore
• Violence
• Mention of suicide and parental death

My thoughts on A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education is a dark academia fantasy novel. It’s pretty short by typical fantasy standards, but manages to pack a lot in. In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that I’ve loved every book of Naomi Novik’s that I’ve read so far. I really enjoy her style. This book wasn’t an exception to that! It probably isn’t my favourite of her books, for reasons I’ll cover shortly, but it’s a hell of an adventure, and definitely swept me away.

A Deadly Education’s characters were a strength for me

Our protagonist is El, short for Galadriel. She’s caustic and defensive and honestly kind of unpleasant? She’s gifted, or cursed depending on how you look at it, with a natural affinity for the most destructive magic. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you want to look at it, she doesn’t want to be, you know, evil. I loved seeing the balance she tries to strike, accepting and playing to her strengths to a point but steering clear of the darkest spells.

Orion Lake, on the other hand, is a ditz and a natural hero. He basically lives to throw himself in front of danger to save others. He’s not exactly sunshine and butterflies, hard for anybody to be super positive in the Scholomance! But he’s unfailingly pleasant and polite, and makes a fun contrast to El’s spikiness.

A lot of the side characters seem quite flat at first glance, which I’ve seen levelled at A Deadly Education as a criticism. But that’s largely because El’s used to looking at the world in a very utilitarian way. She looks at people and considers first what they can do for her, and second what she’d have to do for them in exchange. As time goes on though, she starts to build real relationships with some of the other students, and we get to see that there’s a lot more to them as a result.

Aadhya and Yi Liu are probably the two most fleshed-out side characters throughout the novel, and I grew attached to both of them. They didn’t get enormously detailed character arcs, but Yi Liu in particular got an interesting side-story that wove in nicely with some of the main plot.

I had some mixed feelings on the writing and worldbuilding

One downside of this book for me was that it was very heavy on the info-dumps and exposition. The whole thing is told in the first-person. Which means we spend a lot of time in El’s head getting explanations of how things work and why. Pages and pages sometimes of run-down on why she should or shouldn’t do something. Why other characters might be making specific choices. How the school works. Normally, this would be deeply irritating. For me, in this case, it was only slightly irritating. And that’s because those explanations were so absolutely wild I couldn’t help finding them interesting, even as I had to side-eye the delivery format.

A lot of my forgiveness comes from the fact that the Scholomance, A Deadly Education’s answer to Hogwarts, was brilliant. It was bizarre. It was also honestly kind of terrifying. I’d recommend reading this book purely because the setting is so baffling, honestly.

Would the book have been better if we could have avoided the perpetual info-dump? Possibly. But I also don’t know if I could have come up with a better way of communicating the levels of complexity that were introduced around the school’s functionality. So: mixed feelings.

A Deadly Education controversy

While I’m on the subject of the book’s flaws, I feel like I should reference some of the controversy around A Deadly Education. I’ve seen a lot of people criticising the book for being racist, and a lot of people disputing that critique.

A large part of the issue came from a passage about dreadlocks which did perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Naomi Novik issued a heartfelt apology and has amended that passage for future editions of the book – I don’t think it appeared in the edition I own.

When I finished the book and saw the heated discussions about some of these disputed elements, I found this review a really interesting and thorough discussion of the most oft-cited issues. I recommend giving that a read if you want a more complete picture before deciding whether you want to dive into the series.

The plot feels focused and moves fast

A Deadly Education, despite the time spent on exposition, felt like a very quick read. I was always clear on what El’s goals were, and enjoyed seeing them evolve over the course of the story. The level of threat is always high, which keeps things exciting, and the characters bounce off each other delightfully.

The end of A Deadly Education does a great job of resolving its major plot points in a satisfying way, while also laying groundwork for the sequel. I feel like there’s a good chance book two will be even stronger, since hopefully there’ll be less exposition required now that we’re a little more familiar with the school and main characters. There’s also a tantalising hint of a complex romantic storyline, which I know won’t be for everyone but I’m very keen to see how it unfolds!

I’m excited for A Deadly Education book 2

A Deadly Education’s sequel, The Last Graduate, is out at the moment, and it’s definitely high on my TBR. I might wait until it’s out of hardback, so it can match with book one, or I might run out of patience and just buy it. Either way, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll be reading it.

I’d love to know what you thought of this book, if you’ve read it. I’m also 100% in the market for books similar to A Deadly Education, so let me know if you have any recommendations! In the meantime, I’ll just be over here eyeing up book two…

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