A Deadly Education

304 pages

English language

Published Feb. 26, 2020 by TBS/GBS/Transworld.

ISBN:: 978-1-5291-0085-3

(2 reviews)

“With flawless mastery, Naomi Novik creates a school bursting with magic like you’ve never seen before, and a heroine for the ages—a character so sharply realized and so richly nuanced that she will live on in hearts and minds for generations to come.”

5 editions

Blackberry Jim reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

A Deadly Education

5 stars

Aw, this was a lot of fun. I enjoy the author’s other work and I’m glad that I enjoy this one too - and have a series to look forward to! On my library audiobook app it’s titled ‘A Deadly Education: TikTok made me read it’ which is very funny to me, I didn’t know it got big on tiktok. It makes sense though, it’s good YA that has (imo) well-executed themes of privilege & how it can be ignored by those who benefit from it, it’s got an undeniably dark academia-compatible setting, and it’s got… like…. a ratfic (as in fiction coming out of the rationalist community, like uhhh HPMOR) vibe, if ratfic identified itself more often as a viewpoint particularly attractive to teenagers as a kind of bad way of dealing with a specific set of probably temporary dissatisfactions than the ratfic I’ve read has. (That is pretty …

Aw, this was a lot of fun. I enjoy the author’s other work and I’m glad that I enjoy this one too - and have a series to look forward to! On my library audiobook app it’s titled ‘A Deadly Education: TikTok made me read it’ which is very funny to me, I didn’t know it got big on tiktok. It makes sense though, it’s good YA that has (imo) well-executed themes of privilege & how it can be ignored by those who benefit from it, it’s got an undeniably dark academia-compatible setting, and it’s got… like…. a ratfic (as in fiction coming out of the rationalist community, like uhhh HPMOR) vibe, if ratfic identified itself more often as a viewpoint particularly attractive to teenagers as a kind of bad way of dealing with a specific set of probably temporary dissatisfactions than the ratfic I’ve read has. (That is pretty scathing, which may not be merited. Maybe I have just read the worse bits of rationalism.) It did a much better job of grounding the protagonist’s actions in her believable personality as well - honestly that was something I really enjoyed throughout this book.

There’s worldbuilding stuff I could try and nitpick but it didn’t impact my enjoyment of a generally very fun and expansive-feeling world. I get the sense that a lot of very interesting and very different stories could take place in a thousand different places in this world and not diminish each other, which is nice.

Rating 5/5 - just what I want from YA :3

ranjit@bookwyrm.social reviewed A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance, #1)

Fun all the way through

4 stars

A lot of reviewers complained reasonably that the worldbuilding is pretty unbelievable at times, but I was having too much fun to notice.

I loved the big gimmick underlying the whole book: the protagonist has the talents and affinities to be the most powerful and destructive necromancer of her generation - there’s even prophecies about her! - but she was raised by pacifist hippies and works incredibly hard not to accidentally incinerate or mind-control her classmates, building power not by sacrificing animals but through push-ups and crochet.