The Last Graduate

Image credit: Big W

 It should come as no surprise that as soon as lockdown restrictions were lifted in Sydney, on the first day off that I had, I went out and splurged on new D&D dice and books! I’d been waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the next instalment in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series and, no joke, squealed with delight when I spotted in on the shelf in my local bookstore. Now having closed the cover on it, I’m dying to know what happens next!

It’s El’s final year in the Scholomance and since her questionable yet heroic escapades of the previous semester it seems that the school has decided to really cut out her work for her. But an increased workload, a suspicious timetable, and a class filled with freshmen rather than friends, soon becomes the least of her worries. As the deadly graduation day looms nearer, El and her friends work on a strategy to get out safely, but it seems the school has other plans. Soon El realises that the game’s been changed and in order to survive, she’ll have to break all the rules. 

By the end of A Deadly Education there was definitely the exhilarated feels of an unlikely heroine rising, reluctant/complicated romance story in the works. And while The Last Graduate does pick up where we left off, it’s a slow and patient build back to those excited and climactic thrills that ended the first book. 

In this story we get a little more sense of the Scholomance as a sort-of-sentient being with an agenda and some warped sense of feeling and it’s quite interesting to watch our heroine begin to actually understand it, even feel for it. 

What I realised I love about these books, and Novik’s style generally, is that her stories are not so much narrative-driven, but character driven. From an action perspective, nothing much happens in The Last Graduate; or the pace of the book is so tempered that it feels like nothing is happening. This is absolutely not the case though. Through El’s narration we get this deep and intimate understanding of her and her world as well as the strange journey that she’s on. What I particularly liked in this book is how Novik begins on a recognisable narrative quest trajectory and then completely derails us with multiple bumps and kinks that throw the train completely off its tracks. By the time the Big Showdown takes shape, it’s so far removed from what we expected at the beginning that we’re just now holding on for dear life to a handrail. It’s an excellent ride though. 

Image credit: Goodreads

The end may leave us screaming, but the journey is great and what’s really lovely about this books is the growth of all the characters and the way their own arcs form a bit of a strange shape. There are absolutely no straight lines in a Novik novel and you’d think I’d realise that by now, but she continues to throw me every wonderful spectacular time!

Author: Naomi Novik, 2021

Published: Del Rey, Penguin Random House, 2021

The Last Graduate is the second book in Novik's Scholomance series