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A Deadly Education: A Novel (The Scholomance) Paperback – May 4, 2021

by Naomi Novik (Author)

4.5 16,185 ratings

Book 1 of 3: The Scholomance

Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Uprooted and Spinning Silver comes the first book of the Scholomance trilogy, the story of an unwilling dark sorceress who is destined to rewrite the rules of magic.

FINALIST FOR THE LODESTAR AWARD • “The dark school of magic I’ve been waiting for.”—Katherine Arden, author of the Winternight Trilogy

I decided that Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved my life.

Everyone loves Orion Lake. Everyone else, that is. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I’m not joining his pack of adoring fans.

I don’t need help surviving the Scholomance, even if they do. Forget the hordes of monsters and cursed artifacts, I’m probably the most dangerous thing in the place. Just give me a chance and I’ll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world.

At least, that’s what the world expects. Most of the other students in here would be delighted if Orion killed me like one more evil thing that’s crawled out of the drains. Sometimes I think they want me to turn into the evil witch they assume I am. The school certainly does.

But the Scholomance isn’t getting what it wants from me. And neither is Orion Lake. I may not be anyone’s idea of the shining hero, but I’m going to make it out of this place alive, and I’m not going to slaughter thousands to do it, either.

Although I’m giving serious consideration to just one.

With flawless mastery, Naomi Novik creates a school bursting with magic like you’ve never seen before, and a heroine for the ages—a character so sharply realized and so richly nuanced that she will live on in hearts and minds for generations to come.

The magic of the Scholomance trilogy continues in The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves

“The can’t-miss fantasy of fall 2020, a brutal coming-of-power story steeped in the aesthetics of dark academia. . . . A Deadly Education will cement Naomi Novik’s place as one of the greatest and most versatile fantasy writers of our time.”—BookPage (starred review)

“A must-read . . . Novik puts a refreshingly dark, adult spin on the magical boarding school. . . . Readers will delight in the push-and-pull of El and Orion’s relationship, the fantastically detailed world, the clever magic system, and the matter-of-fact diversity of the student body.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Book 1 of 3

The Scholomance
Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 4, 2021
Dimensions

5.52 x 0.72 x 8.24 inches
ISBN-10

0593128508
ISBN-13

978-0593128503
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Popular Highlights in this book

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My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.
Highlighted by 1,193 Kindle readers
Yes, now I was worrying I’d be turned to the dark side by too much crochet.
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I LOVE HAVING existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“I loved this book. It’s such a nail-biter, it’s funny, it’s thought-provoking, and it’s such a good read.”—BuzzFeed

“Novik deliciously undoes expectations about magic schools, destined heroes, and family legacies. A gorgeous book about monsters and monstrousness, chockablock with action, cleverness, and wit.”—Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“At the Scholomance, monsters are everywhere and the breakfast might kill you, but the wonderful cast of characters will grab ahold of your heart and you’ll never want to leave this deadly school. Naomi Novik skillfully combines sharp humor with layers of imagination to build a fantasy that delights on every level. I loved this brilliant book.”—Stephanie Garber, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Caraval series

“Eyeball-meltingly brilliant . . . Novik is, quite simply, a genius.”—Kiersten White, New York Times bestselling author of And I Darken

“Hilarious and wild! Take any fictional magic school, make it as over-the-top dangerous as possible, and populate it with a bunch of snarky teenagers; the result is pure batshit fun.”—N. K. Jemisin, New York Times bestselling author of The City We Became

“A Deadly Education is a nightmare from which I never wished to wake: savage, inventive, and soulful. Novik grasps the totems of childhood that linger in your mind—schools of magic, curses, cutthroat classmates, monsters—only to twist them into a grand new tale that’ll make you believe in magic again.”—Pierce Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Age

“A Deadly Education is a book that lives up to its gobsmacker of an opening sentence and follows right through to its shocker of an ending that promises more to come. Naomi Novik is relentlessly innovative and entertaining.”—Terry Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Druid

“Friendship in spite of itself; danger that doesn’t quit—what a wildly magical ride!”—Tamora Pierce, New York Times bestselling author of Tempests and Slaughter

“The magic and mystery of this chillingly lovely novel will appeal to both YA and adult fans of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. . . . An unresolved ending leaves readers eager for the next installment.”—Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Naomi Novik is the New York Times bestselling author of A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves, the award-winning novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and the Temeraire series. She is a founder of the Organization for Transformative Works and the Archive of Our Own. She lives in New York City with her family and six computers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Soul-eater

I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn’t really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would’ve been all right if he’d saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so—thirteen is a number with distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could have lived with that. But we’d been in the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn’t shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment.

Selfish of me, you’ll say, to be contemplating with murderous intent the hero responsible for the continued survival of a quarter of our class. Well, too bad for the losers who couldn’t stay afloat without his help. We’re not meant to all survive, anyway. The school has to be fed somehow.

Ah, but what about me, you ask, since I’d needed him to save me? Twice, even? And that’s exactly why he had to go. He set off the explosion in the alchemy lab last year, fighting that chimaera. I had to dig myself out of the rubble while he ran around in circles whacking at its fire-breathing tail. And that soul-eater hadn’t been in my room for five seconds before he came through the door: he must have been right on its heels, probably chasing it down the hall. The thing had only swerved in here looking to escape.

But who’s going to let me explain any of that? The chimaera might not have stuck to me, there were more than thirty kids in the lab that day, but a dramatic rescue in my bedchamber is on another level. As far as the rest of the school is concerned, I’ve just fallen into the general mass of hapless warts that Orion Lake has saved in the course of his brilliant progress, and that was intolerable.

Our rooms aren’t very big. He was only a few steps from my desk chair, still hunched panting over the bubbling purplish smear of the soul-eater that was now steadily oozing into the narrow cracks between the floor tiles, the better to spread all over my room. The fading incandescence on his hands was illuminating his face, not an extraordinary face or anything: he had a big beaky nose that would maybe be dramatic one day when the rest of his face caught up, but for now was just too large, and his forehead was dripping sweat and plastered with his silver-grey hair that he hadn’t cut for three weeks too long. He spends most of his time behind an impenetrable shell of devoted admirers, so it was the closest I’d ever been to him. He straightened and wiped an arm across the sweat. “You okay—Gal, right?” he said to me, just to put some salt on the wound. We’d been in the same lab section for three years.

“No thanks to you and your boundless fascination for every dark thing creeping through the place,” I said icily. “And it is not Gal, it has never been Gal, it’s Galadriel”—the name wasn’t my idea, don’t look at me—“and if that’s too many syllables for you to manage all in one go, El will do.”

His head had jerked up and he was blinking at me in a sort of open-mouthed way. “Oh. Uh. I—I’m sorry?” he said, voice rising on the words, as if he didn’t understand what was going on.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m sorry. Clearly I’m not performing my role up to standard.” I threw a melodramatic hand up against my forehead. “Orion, I was so terrified,” I gasped, and flung myself onto him. He tottered a bit: we were the same height. “Thank goodness you were here to save me, I could never have managed a soul-eater all on my own,” and I hiccuped a pathetically fake sob against his chest.

Would you believe, he actually tried to put his arm round me and give my shoulder a pat, that’s how automatic it was for him. I jammed my elbow into his stomach to shove him off. He made a noise like a whoofing dog and staggered back to gawk at me. “I don’t need your help, you insufferable lurker,” I said. “Keep away from me or you’ll be sorry.” I shoved him back one more step and slammed the door shut between us, clearing the end of that beaky nose by bare centimeters. I had the brief satisfaction of seeing a look of perfect confusion on his face before it vanished away, and then I was left with only the bare metal door, with the big melted hole where the doorknob and lock used to be. Thanks, hero. I glared at it and turned back to my desk just as the blob of soul-eater collapsed the rest of the way, hissing like a leaky steam pipe, and a truly putrescent stink filled the room.

I was so angry that it took me six tries to get a spell for cleaning it up. After the fourth attempt, I stood up and hurled the latest crumbling ancient scroll back into the impenetrable dark on the other side of my desk and yelled furiously, “I don’t want to summon an army of scuvara! I don’t want to conjure walls of mortal flame! I want my bloody room clean!”

What came flying out of the void in answer was a horrible tome encased in some kind of pale crackly leather with spiked corners that scraped unpleasantly as it skidded to me across the metal of the desk. The leather had probably come off a pig, but someone had clearly wanted you to think it had been flayed from a person, which was almost as bad, and it flipped itself open to a page with instructions for enslaving an entire mob of people to do your bidding. I suppose they would have cleaned my room if I told them to.

I had to actually take out one of my mother’s stupid crystals and sit down on my narrow squeaky bed and meditate for ten minutes, with the stench of the soul-eater all around me and getting into my clothes and sheets and papers. You’d think that any smell would clear out quickly, since one whole wall of the room is open to the scenic view of a mystical void of darkness, so delightfully like living in a spaceship aimed directly into a black hole, but you’d be wrong. After I finally managed to walk myself back from the incoherent kicking levels of anger, I pushed the pigskin book off the far edge of my desk back into the void—using a pen to touch it, just in case—and said as calmly as I could manage, “I want a simple household spell for cleaning away an unwanted mess with a bad smell.”

Sullenly down came—thump—a gigantic volume titled Amunan Hamwerod packed completely full of spells written in Old English—my weakest dead language—and it didn’t open to any particular page, either.

That sort of thing is always happening to me. Some sorcerers get an affinity for weather magic, or transformation spells, or fantastic combat magics like dear Orion. I got an affinity for mass destruction. It’s all my mum’s fault, of course, just like my stupid name. She’s one of those flowers and beads and crystals sorts, dancing to the Goddess under the moon. Everyone’s a lovely person and anyone who does anything wrong is misunderstood or unhappy.

She even does massage therapy for mundanes, because “it’s so relaxing to make people feel better, love.” Most wizards don’t bother with mundane work—it’s considered a bit low—or if they do, they hunt themselves out an empty sack of a job. The person who retires from the firm after forty-six years and no one quite remembers what they were doing, the befuddled librarian that you occasionally glimpse wandering the stacks without seeming to do anything, the third vice president of marketing who shows up only for meetings with senior management; that sort of thing. There’re spells to find those jobs or coax them into existence, and then you’ve provided yourself with the necessities of life and kept your time free to build mana and make your cheap flat into a twelve-room mansion on the inside. But not Mum. She charges almost nothing, and that little mostly because if you offer to do professional massage for free, people will look at you sideways, as well they should.

Naturally I came out designed to be the exact opposite of this paragon, as anyone with a basic understanding of the balancing principle might have expected, and when I want to straighten my room, I get instructions on how to kill it with fire. Not that I can actually use any of these delightful cataclysmic spells the school is so eager to hand out to me. Funnily enough, you can’t actually whip up an entire army of demons on just a wink.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Worlds; First Edition, First Printing (May 4, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593128508
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593128503
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.52 x 0.72 x 8.24 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #14,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #158 in Historical Fantasy (Books)
- #1,010 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- #1,184 in Epic Fantasy (Books)

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4.5 16,185 ratings

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Naomi Novik

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An avid reader of fantasy literature since age six, Naomi Novik is also a history buff with a particular fascination with the Napoleonic era and a fondness for the work of Patrick O'Brian and Jane Austen. She lives with her husband and daughter in New York City along with many purring computers.

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Bookwyrm

Absolutely mesmerizing, what a ride!

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2020

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A Deadly Education (The Scholomance Book 1) was just way too much fun. It was one of those books you just don’t want to put down because the world is just so engaging. Yes, there were elements that seemed derivative, except some ideas are universal and Novik adds her own unique twists, for example: moving staircases became so much more deadly and purposeful than some other famous moving staircases, as the school ratchets itself down, moving the students over the course of four years down to the graduation hall.

There was great inner monologue that really added to the story, just fantastically well-done, believable, and relatable (if you’re an evil sorceress in the making or other potential evil human). So many relatable and likable characters. Enough information that you become invested in the characters and hope that they survive their deadly education.

And there are some astonishingly well-incorporated life lessons. Trust me, I’ve just finished a couple of books where the themes were bludgeoned into the hapless reader over and over with no hint of subtlety or finesse. Novik does it right. The story is the lesson, with no bludgeons required. Just realistic situations and reactions. Kudos!

I’d recently come off a semi-binge on Novik’s Temeraire series and have really been enjoying it, so I had to grab A Deadly Education when it came up recommended. (Wish I’d noticed it when it first came out.)

If I were to meet you in an isle at the local bookstore, I’d steer you over to this book as a must-read. The only downside to A Deadly Education is that I hit the end full-stop, almost shattered. I’d assumed, for some reason, that the next book was already out and popped over to buy it, only to discover it was a preorder. (Instantly preordered.) Now, I shall have to practice waiting patiently for the next installment. Just to be clear; this is not a cliffhanger or a serial. This is a true series where minor and many major plot lines are wrapped up, but some are left to be answered in the next story.

Highly recommended to fantasy lovers and those who love a good story.

One person found this helpful

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Sadie Noni

An action-packed teen fantasy

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2023

Verified Purchase

Galadriel and Orion are the students at Scholomance. Right off the bat there’s tension between them. She doesn’t want help. He can’t stop giving it. They’re both powerful and interesting. You know how it goes.

The world building happens at lightning speed as does character development. I’ve read Novik’s Temeraire series but I guess Scholomance is written for a younger audience and therefore the pace.

It’s an entertaining, plot-driven story and on the surface about how magic works and the age old fight between good vs evil. But I liked that Novik described building up the potential for good magic - mana - through music, exercise, doing chores, and bad magic - malia - by stealing from others. It’s not subtle but the message is sound.

The writing is crisp and tight. Not one word wasted, even though the sentences are longer than average. It’s also funny. A couple of things I didn’t love: the prolonged instances of the protagonist Galadriel talking about herself. Too often and for too long. It deepened her character but did largely nothing for the plot. Second, because the entire story is so action packed, the climax was a non event. It felt like we were building towards something major, but I was disappointed with the end.

Still, overall an entertaining and easy read. I’d recommend it if you like fantasy and are looking for something very light to fill the gap between two more serious books.

4 people found this helpful

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MistressViolet

Dark and Deadly

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2024

Verified Purchase

Loved this! Fantastic worldbuilding. There is a dark and deadly school that reeks of decay coupled with a unique and thoroughly fleshed-out system of magic. There are lots of diverse characters and personality types. And the story is action-packed, with tension and intrigue.

I will note that this book was a slow start for me. The first chapter read like a bit of an information dump. But once I hit the second chapter, I couldn't put this one down and ended up finishing it all in a single night.

Book 2 is now on my radar!

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Jose

A great start, and a grater tsunderere

Reviewed in Mexico on December 27, 2021

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The main charachter is just such a lovely tsundere. The kind of girl with a resting bitch face and a death stare to make weaker boys to go running, but with a mushy lovable interior a penchant for always doing what's right, no matter the cost, and a great brave heart full of love for her friends and significant others.

Skyrade

Der Bestseller der Sunday Times

Reviewed in Germany on March 7, 2024

Verified Purchase

Diese fesselnde Geschichte entführt die Leser in eine Welt voller Magie, Gefahr und unerwarteter Wendungen. Die Autorin schafft eine faszinierende Umgebung, in der eine Schule nicht nur Wissen, sondern auch Überlebensfähigkeiten lehrt. Tauche ein in dieses mitreißende Buch, das dich von der ersten bis zur letzten Seite in seinen Bann ziehen wird – ein Muss für alle, die sich nach einer einzigartigen und packenden Leseerfahrung sehnen.

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isabel Lima

Bom livro

Reviewed in Spain on June 7, 2023

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Bom livro. Chegou rápido

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Emy

Novo favorito

Reviewed in Brazil on February 9, 2021

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No começo fiquei triste que paguei mais caro no livro e tinha o mesmo mais barato, porém valeu cada centavo. A história tem muitas explicações no meio pra você entender e cada reviravolta, o que vai acontecendo e como aquilo vai rolando, a atitude da Galadriel com todo mundo foi muito bem desenvolvido, eu adorei o livro e estou em choque com o final, muito ansiosa pro próximo, já reservei, com esperanças de que seja um livro bem maior pra eu demorar mais apreciando isso.

7 people found this helpful

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Wilfried Tinkhauser

++

Reviewed in Italy on April 26, 2023

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Tutto molto bene

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