Excellent ending to an excellent trilogy. Things come full circle in ways I didn’t see coming; indeed, in ways I didn’t realize there were things to come full circle. Naomi Novik is one of my favorite authors, and this trilogy reinforced that.
If you haven’t read the first two books, read no further. Spoiler warning for the first two Scholomance books.
This picks up right where I expected it to: El screaming in rage at Orion in a Welsh forest, followed immediately by frantic but unsuccessful attempts to magically get his stupid heroic ass out of there.
What followed was not what I was expecting, but in retrospect I think I should have been.
My assumption was that book 3 would be a rescue mission: El, Aadhya, Liu, and the rest of the gang figuring out a way to get back into the cast-into-the-Void Scholomance, reaching it, and rescuing Orion. I assumed it would follow the same general competence-porn structure as the other books, with meticulous planning leading up to a grand, complex, and carefully executed mission.
This is not in the least what happens.
El is somewhere between in shock and in mourning after graduation, convalescing in her mom’s yurt, for about a week. When Liesel shows up, tells her that the London enclave has been attacked, there’s a maw mouth in there and as the only person who has ever successfully 1v1’d a maw mouth (make that two maw mouths), El is needed.
(“I’m not going in for a career of hunting maw-mouths!” I said. “Aren’t you?” Liesel said, contemptuously. “What else are you going to do?”)
Rescuing Orion is a part of this book, but there’s so much more going on. The prophecy about El from her great-great-grandmother. Why her mom is so against living in one, regardless of the wizards living there. Why exactly the Scholomance gave El the Golden Stone Sutras. Why she is so freaking powerful. Why and how Orion can do what he can do, converting mals directly into mana. And oh yeah, remember how in book 2 we heard about the Bangkok enclave mysteriously being destroyed? What was up with that? Turns out it was just the beginning.
I cannot wait for Novik’s next project. I do and do not want more books in the Scholomance universe: the story wraps up beautifully, but there’s also room for more. Whatever we get, I look forward to.
I also learned, after reading this, that it was possible to get a copy of the Scholomance Freshman Orientation Book: a supplement written by Novik, including commentary by El, in what sounds something like the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages supplements to Harry Potter. I wish I’d heard about that before I got this. Now I’m stuck screaming “shut up and take my money!” into the void, but alas, there does not seem to be a way to buy it.
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