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The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

Naomi Novik

Start date: October 1, 2021

Finish date: October 31, 2021

Discussion: Group Reads

Why we're reading this: Featured Buddy Read October 2021
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What Members Thought

Oct 03, 2021 Nataliya rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2021-reads, 2022-reads, lodestar-and-andre-norton-awards

Reluctant heroes who are not blinded by optimism, who know the stakes and crazy odds and still step up to the plate because sometimes you just can’t look the other way and protect your own hide — they are the best.

(Also, they are a Murderbot.)

“I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.”

It’s easy to try and dismiss Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series as another book about teenagers in a wizarding school, riding the coattails of Harry Potter books — but th Reluctant heroes who are not blinded by optimism, who know the stakes and crazy odds and still step up to the plate because sometimes you just can’t look the other way and protect your own hide — they are the best.

(Also, they are a Murderbot.)

“I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.”

It’s easy to try and dismiss Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series as another book about teenagers in a wizarding school, riding the coattails of Harry Potter books — but that would be far from truth. Despite showing young people in school, it’s definitely adult in tone and themes, digging deep into societal issues and quite uncomfortable topics (class privilege most of all) while still giving an exciting and tightly plotted story, compelling cast of characters, heaps of snark and grim humor infused with a healthy dose of sardonic realism, and stakes and tension that feel real and make you care.

“[…] If you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention.”

What if your high school graduation wasn’t a boring ceremony filled with weird veneration for sitting through a few years of classes but instead a desperate fight past ravenous hordes of monsters for whom your graduating class is basically an annual dinner buffet? And your school - teacher-free (but not exactly what Pink Floyd had in mind) and infested with those monsters (“maleficaria”, drawn to magic and the vulnerable wizarding kids full of it) provided you with 1 in 4 odds of making it through the four years, which is still better than the chances of a wizarding kid in the outside world — and those chances are even worse if you are basically cannon fodder that allows well-connected wizarding enclave kids to survive. Because magic is not free, and survival is very much tied to privilege and power. It’s a cruel and dangerous world.

Well, welcome to Scholomance! Like Hotel California, there’s a good chance that you will never leave - except as a digested meal of school’s resident maleficaria hordes.

“We’ve all spent the best part of four years training as hard as we could to be inhumanly selfish in a way we could only possibly live with because all of us were going round in fear for our lives—if not in the next five minutes then on graduation day at the latest—and you could tell yourself everyone else was doing the same and there wasn’t any other choice. The Scholomance had encouraged it if anything. Everyone-for-themselves worked well enough to get 25 percent of the students out through the unending horde […]”

Galadriel “El” Higgins is a tough-as-nails loner outcast who managed to survive three years of Scholomance without giving in to her natural magical affinity — laying waste to multitudes through dark sorcery. Even more, she not only managed to save a few lives but even reluctantly made friends, including Scholomance’s brilliant but irritating resident hero/savior/monster-slayer Orion.

“Most people have to study a spell at length to get it into their head. I do, too, if it’s a useful spell. But if it’s a spell to destroy cities or slaughter armies or torture people horribly—or, for instance, to shrivel up significant parts of a boy’s anatomy into a single agonizingly painful lump—one glance and it’s in there for good.”

You see, as much as she’d incinerate you with an angry glare for even suggesting it, El Higgins who’s capable of laying waste to multitudes and has even even her cleaning spells forced on her with a side effect of world domination and possibly a supervolcano, is really an idealist and herself a reluctant hero in the making — but a very reluctant, pessimistic and snarky hero indeed. And with graduation slaughter approaching, El comes to realize that not only does she want to get out of Scholomance alive but that she’d want to see those she cares about (and even those she does not) to not fall prey to monster jaws, not to mention hoping that it’s not only the well-connected privileged enclave kids who get a chance at survival but also those who’d be normally relegated to minion/cannon fodder status.

“I don’t think my appearance was reassuring. I emerged trailing clouds of dark-green smoke flickering phosphorescent with crackles of lightning, the dwindling remnants of the hurricane I’d whipped up to dissolve the shambling army of frozen-mud-things. There was also the large ring of glowing orange-purple balefire spheres orbiting round my waist. The workings all fizzled out as I came through the doors, but they hung in the air just long enough to make a fashion statement of the ‘behold your dark goddess’ variety.”

Image credit to https://jmaddalina.myportfolio.com/il...)

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Just like in the previous book, our focus here is on the stark social contrasts within Scholomance — the multitude of advantages that kids from rich and comparatively safe wizarding enclaves have due to concentrated power, wealth, support and ability to manipulate the enclaveless students into doing their bidding by dangling the promise of possibility of securing a chance to get a coveted enclave spot and allow a chance of survival and security. The enclavers have grown up knowing that they are expected to make it out with fewer casualties while having a much easier time, and many of them do not even see the privilege that they have as for them it’s simply reality.

“Alfie with Liesel and the brilliant team she’d built, Magnus and his wolf pack; they hadn’t spent four years being slowly taught over and over that another kid had the right to live and they hadn’t.”

And now El with her obvious immense magical power and in a strong graduation alliance, not to mention the relationship with the school hero Orion, is no longer a sullen loner but an asset that all the enclave kids would like to see on their teams to further increase their chance of getting through the graduation slaughter intact. She’s now posed to immensely benefit from the quid-pro-quo system in this brutal tribalist and transactionalist microcosm of society. But El is finding it a bit unsettling seeing the long-established pattern of power relationships in the school trying to fit her in that mold. And she is trying to figure out whether she wants to work within the system that now favors her — or whether the system itself, built on the needs of those in power, needs to go.

Obviously those are issues plaguing our society at this time, and in less skilled hands it could have been a shoehorned attempt to be relevant and topical — and as many of these “zeitgeist”chasers it could have been weak and boring and artificial. Novik, however, manages to bring in the issues organically, to incorporate them in the story itself instead of proselytizing, and to treat her characters not as stock mouthpieces of her message but make them realistic people who are well-rounded and are not defined by a sole quality or trait. The kids even outside of the main cast have depth and complexity and therefore lifelike relatability. And character growth rings true and organically comes from the story development.

“Not really,” I said, and laughed a little, jangly and helpless, and put my hands over my face so I didn’t have to look at her, my friend, the first friend I’d ever had, besides Orion, who didn’t count; the first normal sane person in the world who’d looked at me and decided she was going to give me a chance to not hurt her.”

Societal expectations and how nurture shapes people is another prominent theme. We see enclaver kids safe and secure in their ingrained belief that their lives are worth protecting — although after hanging out with El, some see the disparities as an awful unearned gap they are. We see El herself, shaped so much not only by her dark nature but by her hippie commune-dwelling mother into a remarkable human being. But most painfully we get to see Orion Lake, the much-lauded hero whose personality at least in part was shaped by the expectations of those around him, and who is viewed not only as a supposed hero but really as a tool to be used to achieve a comfortable existence regardless of what he would want if he’d only stopped to think for a moment.

“He’d been trained to think he was only good if he ran around being a hero all the time. Naturally as soon as he dared think about what *he* might want, surely that made him a monster. But as someone who’s been told she’s a monster from almost all corners from quite early on, I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence.”

————

And yeah, for those of us who are the fans of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series — El is basically a Murderbot (thanks, Carol!), sullen and snarky and hiding her feelings and made to be feared while ready to lay down her life to protect those who need protection — all while being painfully realistic and grumpily grim about all those humans that need rescue.

“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, and escaped to the comparative safety of my independent study down in the bowels of the school, where the worst thing that was going to leap at me with devouring attention was a flesh-eating monster.”

———

Oh yeah, and if you already heard that there’s an annoying cliffhanger, it’s true. Although here it seems to actually logically follow the story thread, and I was expecting something like that. Needless to say, I’m getting my hands on the next book in the series the moment it’s out.

4.5 stars.

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“Everyone else was still on board for exactly the same reason everyone was ever on board with anything in here, which was exactly the same reason everyone ever put themselves into this hellpit of a school, and that’s because it was better than the alternatives. That was all I could be: the lesser evil.”

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My review of the first book in the series, A Deadly Education, is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Winner of the Lodestar Award 2022 (a.k.a. Baby Hugo)

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2022 reread after series is completed: Love it dearly. El is awesome. ...more

306 likes · Like · see review

Nov 23, 2021 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, 2021-shelf, horror, ya

I really can't overstate this: I love this book. I loved the one preceding it, too, but I REALLY loved this book.

Why?

Because it was fun all the way down to the deepest levels, with all the eldritch horrors clawing their way into the school, with only a reasonable expectation of 1 in 4 kids making it out alive.

Because it had all the magical charm of Hogwarts without any of the sappy sweet. It was a fight and die with every last bit of your strength, casting the most deadly, mana-consuming spells ...more

57 likes · Like · see review

Aug 18, 2022 Niki Hawkes - The Obsessive Bookseller rated it really liked it

Check out my Booktube channel at: The Obsessive Bookseller

The Last Graduate was a completely satisfying sequel.

Hearing that the series had been expanded to three books, I got a little cranky and put off reading this second book for almost a year. I was certain it was going to be nothing but filler content and didn’t want a disappointing read after having absolutely loved Deadly Education (book 1). Well, I need to take off my fortune-telling hat and stop being so cynical, because I loved this ins ...more

23 likes · Like · see review

Sep 04, 2021 Emma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, netgalley, magic, urban-fantasy, ya, school

The world of the Scholomance is so well conceived- it’s a real pleasure to reimmerse myself in that world. El is in a much stronger position now and negotiations for trade offs, alliances, producing and using mana remain the focal point of daily school life. Be warned: there’s a big cliffhanger at the end- becoming somewhat a trademark of the series! Many thanks to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

16 likes · Like · see review

Oct 17, 2021 Vavita rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I liked it more than the first one. The end was obvious but, not boring at all. Reading this book was delicious!

8 likes · Like · see review

Oct 08, 2021 Denise rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: women-2021

Like no other magic school. In fact it’s not the magic school everyone thinks it is. Wonderful twists and a well sketched out world. Gotta love El’s mum!

4 likes · Like · see review

Oct 19, 2021 Lata rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-f-h, auth-f, bipoc-actor, x2021-read

A more entertaining instalment than book one, probably because I was already used to the school's many ravening mouths, El's small group of fellow students that she actually interacts with mostly voluntarily, and the stakes, which are, get out alive after graduation.
With that in mind, the seniors decide to work together, eventually, to make it through the last big test for them to graduate. Of course, there are deaths along the way, and there are arguments, and I found myself snickering at El's ...more

3 likes · Like · see review