Thursday, September 23, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

 


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 28, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


The Last Graduate is the second book in Naomi Novik's new YA fantasy trilogy, The Scholomance, which began with last year's "A Deadly Education" (My review is here).  I liked A Deadly Education thanks to its really fun sardonic narration courtesy of its heroine El, who made even the novels' frequent infodumps enjoyable to read.  Add in a story that featured themes of class, race, and privilege, a school for teenage magic users that was constantly trying to kill them, and a fun little romance between the mass-destroying El and heroic evil-slaying Orion, and you had a story that was very enjoyable....even if it had some issues trading in national stereotypes at times.*  The book ended on not quite a cliffhanger, but a hell of a sequel hook, which threatened to cause some big trouble for the trilogy's central romance.

*This is an issue in other Novik works as well, such as the Temeraire series.  

Unfortunately, The Last Graduate features the worst traits of its predecessor - the national stereotypes, the persistent info-dumping - getting notably worse, and the book's character work being overwhelmed by the info-dumping.  The book does nothing with the tantalizing sequel hook and its central romance is basically forgotten for long stretches, and the final quarter of the book depends upon so much infodumping and plot elements pulled out of almost nowhere, that it just drags and disappoints.  There are still some solid work with the themes of class and privilege here, and the dialogue is often very quotable and fun, but this is a very disappointing second novel in what looked like a promising new trilogy.  

Spoilers for book 1 below are inevitable:

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
El has seemingly achieved the impossible - survived the seniors' graduation and maybe fixed the machinery to clean out Mals for her own graduation.  She's entering senior year in the Scholomance even more impossibly with....allies?  friends?  And then there's hero Orion Lake, the privileged enclave boy who kept foiling her plans.....who turned to be more than he seemed....and who she started falling for.  With all this, El was surely prepared for whatever the Scholomance could throw at her for senior year, right?  

Wrong.  

First, there's El's mother's message, telling her to stay away from Orion.  Then there's the fact that the school has reacted to El's antics by pulling out all the stops in trying to either kill El...or to make El give-in and turn Maleficer after all.  Which El could avoid if she didn't suddenly find it impossible not to follow Orion's example herself in becoming a hero and saving others....a decision that threatens her own chances of surviving graduation.  

To make it out of it all with this new mindset, El will need the last thing she's comfortable seeking - more help from other students.   But with her powers of destruction, her attitude, and her not being one of the privileged Enclavers, will they really be willing to help her more than they already have?  
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The Last Graduate starts strong, continuing the story as a new year begins for El - her senior year - in the Scholomance.  El's voice remains incredibly fun for much of the book, with her sardonic and antisocial personality being highly relatable (to me at least), and her internal character struggles both make sense and are handled well.  She's gone from being an utter loner, figuring to never have friends and fooling herself into thinking she's going to use her powers to impress an Enclave to have a peaceful happy life to suddenly realizing: a) she has friends who like her for her; b) she has no real interest in joining the cushy privileged life of an enclave (and still resents those Enclavers, even if some of them aren't so bad) and c) she suddenly really likes a boy romantically in Orion and is having some real heroic instincts as a result....instincts she once regarded as utterly foolish.  And her default reaction to these things being pointed out is to talk back and be abrasive, which only gets worse when the very school starts trying very hard to specifically kill her, making it impossible for her to deny these things that much longer.  

And so El's transformation from loner looking to survive, in denial about her own beliefs, into a girl who has decided to be a hero despite her best efforts, and who reacts even further towards heroism when pushed....and has to deal with the consequence of that, is the best part of the book, especially for the first half - because to make that transformation and survive, El is forced to realize that she needs to ask for help and reveal her true abilities, even as she has to do more and more by herself.  And the people El has to ask for help includes the people who once shunned her, the privileged enclavers, and those she otherwise resents....and who might now resent her.  El has to deal with people who respond to her revealing her abilities either by going into full on lobbying campaigns for her to support their group or by assuming she's already made an alliance with another group that makes her untrustworthy and necessary to kill. 

The result of this is a book that very much is anti-Lord of the Flies, to use a classic example, in which El has to bring everyone together despite distrust and massive paranoia in order for everyone to survive, and in some ways this works.  

It's too bad about everything else though, because the farther the book gets, the more it loses its way and has more and more problems that made it difficult to get through and enjoy.  I mentioned in my review of A Deadly Education that I didn't think the info-dumping by El hurt the pacing, because El's sardonic voice made it fun and all the info dumping was necessary.  Well, that's absolutely not the case here, where El's info-dumping gets WORSE, and keeps happening for topics and ideas that are absolutely not necessary - for example, it isn't just El info-dumping about how her spells will do horrible horrible things to people (which still happens and is still a treat), but we have El 2/3 of the way through the book info dumping about magical preparation of food for no reason for three whole pages and we have a side character infodumping about minor Mals that essentially cause magical rust for a page and many many more examples.  I started skimming/skipping through these segments, because it would go on and on and I just....did....not......care.  And as the book gets into its final act, there is basically nothing but info-dumping, because the book stops caring about character dynamics at that point, with everything resolved at the 3/4 mark, and instead about problem solving the situation....except the book has basically not setup things in a way that allow the problem solving to be an interesting combination of already existing pieces.  

Speaking of character dynamics, the book drops the ball quite a lot with those, most notably with the central romance of El with Orion - who basically has no part/dialogue in like the first 50 pages and disappears entirely for large stretches of the time.  And so when the time comes to culminate their romance, and the romance results in another major part of the ending, these things just basically come from nowhere - and as a result, the last book's cliffhanger goes absolutely NOWHERE.  And other character dynamics, especially for characters not part of the main grouping are informed entirely by those characters' nationalities, which is just unfortunate: so of course the Shanghai Enclave is against the New York Enclave (because magical politics must be the same as normal ones!) and everyone in there is basically aligned together and a massive group, the Japanese Enclave has its own ethos that is basically stereotypical (and subject of another infodump), etc.  Even more annoyingly, the two minor characters that wind up in same-sex relationships - the only queer relationships in the books as far as I can tell - both feel like they either have to hide those interests or that those interests are going to cause them problems in the real world.  It's due to the nationalities involved, not due to homophobia, but when those are the only such relationships, it's really noticeable and a problem.  

So yeah, The Last Graduate is a bit of a miss, there's a lot of promise with the setup, and the ending takes a theme that I've seen a lot these days and kind of makes it work, but is just held back by Novik getting obsessed with info-dumping about the setting at the expense of the characters and her continued usage of stereotypes.  I might check out the conclusion because I do care about El....but it won't be high on my list if I do.  

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