Asakiyume mita

In between making my way through various nineteenth-century masterpieces in carefully timed chunks so I can discuss them with other weirdos on Discord, I did find time to read a whole book. Like last time, this whole book did have to be a fast-paced YA fantasy for me to fit it in around the 19th century masterpieces and also the rest of my life, which has been consumed with housing stuff, organizing drama, and generally having panic attacks.

Anyway, whatever difficulties I think I’m having in my own life, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series is always good for making them seem very small and manageable by comparison. At least monsters aren’t coming out of my shower drains to eat me.

The second book of the Scholomance trilogy is The Last Graduate, which covers our heroine Galadriel’s senior year. El’s senior year turns out to be basically one long face-off against the school itself, in an even more targeted way than usual. The school is a fierce opponent: El’s not sure what it wants, at first, but the school is bound and determined to make her learn, and everybody else, too. One of the things the school forces them all to learn is how to work collaboratively, which it’s kind of also been doing the whole time but now it really ramps it up; this is the power fantasy aspect of the story (speaking as someone who’s ten years into an experiment of trying to get people to work collaboratively and somehow we’re worse at it than we were when I first joined). The competence porn really goes up to 11 with the introduction of the valedictorian character Liesel, who exists largely to make sure that we realize all the stuff El hasn’t managed to learn in the previous three years that she really should have. Liesel is, unsurprisingly, one of my new favorites, although even she cannot displace Aadhya in my heart, as a fan of ruthlessly pragmatic women.

El’s romance with Orion is also somewhat interesting as we begin to learn the depths of just how strange and socially obtuse Orion actually is, especially considering that social obtuseness is usually a death sentence in the Scholomance. Overall, though, this was the part of the plot I was the least invested in; El and Orion are at their most interesting when they are killing mals together, given the way their magical strengths are both geared toward that but in different ways.

The social/political commentary in here is not subtle but it is fun, and we get to keep learning more about the history of the school and the wizarding world outside, even as the student body is isolated from the current events of the wizarding world, with only a little bit of jumbled news brought in at the beginning of every year from the incoming class of freshmen. This year’s big news story was that the entire Bangkok enclave had mysteriously disappeared, which had lots of interesting potential explanations and possible political implications, which the kids have absolutely no way of verifying.

Anyway, I’m just really enjoying the worldbuilding in this series. I’ve put a hold on The Golden Enclaves and with luck it’ll come in today.