Monday, December 21, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

 



A Deadly Education is the latest novel - and the start of a new trilogy - by award winning fantasy author Naomi Novik.  Novik has written two types of novels - her stand alone fairy tale subversions (Uprooted, Spinning Silver) or her alternate history fantasy Temeraire series (The Napoleonic Wars with Dragons!).  I really really enjoyed the latter - the whole Temeraire series was tremendous fun and I highly recommend it - but haven't quite loved the former, with Spinning Silver really not working at all for me.  So I was not sure what to expect from A Deadly Education, since it didn't really fit into either category.  

What I found was a book I really enjoyed, even if it had a few quirks that were kind of annoying.  The book's first person narrator is fantastic, and while the book has a tendency to infodump, her sarcastic tone and wit prevent the book from ever dragging.  Add in a very fun setting - a magic school in which everything is basically trying to kill all the students and a protagonist with the power but not the temperament to cause mass destruction - and some solid underlying themes and you have a book that is pretty damn good as the start of a new series.

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Magical Talent and Belief, especially in young untrained wizards, draw Mals - magical monsters - in search of power to feed on.  And so magical children have always had a high mortality rate in the world...which is why many wizards of prominence came together into powerful Enclaves.  And which is why some Wizards from those Enclaves created The Scholomance, a magical school for young wizards.  But naturally a school of so much young untrained magical power will draw a bevy of powerful Mals, making the school itself a death trap, barely less lethal than the outside - and even more lethal for those who don't come from Enclaves and are on their own  It's a "school" which kills nearly half of its students and graduation is the most deadly test of all - especially for those with no one they can rely upon.

Galadriel ("El") is unfortunately one of those loners - she comes from a hippie commune run by her powerful mother and she's never had the personality to make many friends.  It doesn't help that her magical affinity is for spells that cause mass death and destruction - spells that not only aren't particularly practical, but would require her to siphon power and lifeforce from the other students and go full on maleficer to actually cast - something she's determined to absolutely not do, no matter how tempting.  Her only hope of survival she knows relies upon her demonstrating her talent for mass destruction to some of the Enclave students so that they might decide they want her after all.  

Except Orion Lake, Enclave boy and Combat Spell genius, keeps killing every Mal he comes across and saving her life...and preventing her from showing off her skills.  Even worse, he's begun to follow her around in fear of her going full maleficer - which his actions are really tempting her to do.....
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A Deadly Education is told entirely from El's first person perspective, which works because El is so much damn fun as a narrator - a sarcastic teenage girl who doesn't generally like other people - at least not easily.  That's especially the case for her feelings towards the Enclaves, who she correctly views as cliques of privileged people who don't realize how good they have it and how much they screw over the rest of the magical world through their actions.  Which makes El's magical situation all the more frustrating:  El has the power to cause tremendous destruction and death - indeed, it's her affinity, so it's her best and most suitable skill (such that ordinary spells she casts will result in their most violently devastating variations if she's not absolutely careful) - and yet she absolutely does not want to do so: for she knows that to cast such spells will usually require her to tap into Malia, the dark magic absorbed from other living things (another thing she easily has an aptitude for) and she's determined to be a good person and not what everyone thinks she is - a dark wizard who should be killed.  

But the Scholomance doesn't make that easy for El.  First of all, the school is attuned to her affinity for destruction and keeps providing her spellbooks and spells of murder and mayhem even when all she wants is spells for simple handiwork - and only provides her spells in the latter in obscure languages just to make them harder to learn.  In order to obtain the spells she will need to maintain an ordinary - well as ordinary as possible - life, El has to trade spells and other goods to other students...except El isn't good at dealing with others in the first place.  Then there's all the enclave kids, as well as the other students who actually are willingly delving into dark magic, and the monsters, and the temptation to give in to her affinity and go full Maleficer, as she's prophecized to do, is so so tempting.  

And then there's Orion Lake, the spoiled Enclave boy who doesn't understand the privilege he has who won't stop following El around.  And yet, he's almost the flipped coin version of El in so many ways - so brilliantly talented at combat and being a hero that he has since being a child that everyone has always worshipped and wanted to get close to him...and no one has valued him for who he is or wanted simply to be his friend.  And so, in El's behavior as the only person not to idol worship him, Orion finds something he can't leave alone and the two have a tumultuous relationship El would never admit might've turned into friendship...but totally does.  

This dynamic - of the characters, of the setting, etc. - leads to a plotline that deals with some very strong themes and ideas that work mostly well through El's strong narration.  The biggest theme is that of privilege, in how the Enclaves essentially have manipulated the system so that only they are likely to survive, and to create the very deadly Scholomance that El and the rest of the students are trapped in - just to reduce their mortality rate at the cost of increasing the rate of death of others.  The plot hammers how much harder El and others like her - who seem quite often to be from nonwhite populations - have to work not just to survive, but to do good, as any slight slip up will lead them to their destruction, while the Enclave members can do horrible things and survive and be forgiven in the end.  And this dynamic is done again extremely well so that the plot never slows down from beginning to end, with the ending being both satisfying and tantalizing in terms of setting up book 2.  The book does have a tremendous habit of infodumping for large stretches of time, which does weaken this plot a bit, but El's voice makes even the infodumps entertaining so that it never slows down too much over the course of the novel's length.

A note:  One other review of this book by a Person of Color reviewer (see here) makes a decently convincing argument that while A Deadly Education's themes of the evils of privilege and power are very solid and worthwhile, the book indulges in some tropes regarding people of color or without privilege - being categorized only by their language or having them reject the mixed-race good-at-heart protagonist - that are...not great.  I missed a lot of this in my own read (As a non-POC, not surprising), but did note one clear instance of this that bothered me: a throwaway line about how two boys named Ibrahim (Presumably a Muslim and likely an Arab) and Yaakov (Presumably Jewish and likely Israeli) are best friends inside the school but wouldn't talk to each other outside it - which struck this Jewish reader as uncomfortably stereotypical.  

That negative aside - and for some that'll be a bigger negative than others admittedly, since I mostly missed most of it in my readthrough for example - El's narrative and the plot and other characters are so entertaining that I did really enjoy A Deadly Education.  So yeah I'll definitely be back for book two, when it comes out in 2021.

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