I know nobody else cares, but if anyone knows who’s causing that pinging sound I’m always hearing in my ears, if you could get them to stop, I’ll be so grateful I’d probably bake you a cake. Once I find the party that’s doing it, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, I guarantee you. I was talking to a customer at the store today when it started up; I mentioned it to him, and we both decided, in lieu of a better idea, that it was coming from a debris field strung somewhere in the Atlantic. OK, that’s off my chest for now. Just remember, though, I warned you: I’m cranky about these sound effects.
I do actually have a topic for this post, and that’s the trilogy I just finished reading that I think some of you would enjoy, Naomi Novik’s “The Scholomance” series. I sometimes use EBSCO’s NoveList database (which you can probably access through your local public library) to find books similar to other books I’ve enjoyed, and I think that’s where I came across the trilogy’s first book, A Deadly Education. I was investigating books in the intriguingly named “Dark Academia” genre, and that led me to this title. Dark Academia is having a definite cultural moment. Some of this interest can be traced back to Harry Potter, but there are a lot of wildly different variations on the theme, as I have found.
In the Scholomance, students attend a school of magic in an alternate universe with the void as its backyard and spend four years of secondary education trying not to get killed. That’s it, in a nutshell. There are no adults around; course schedules appear out of thin air, the cafeteria is self-serve, and monsters (or “mals”) may found at any time in the food, in the shower heads, in the library, or around any random corner at all. Students spend their time learning and perfecting spells and tend to specialize according to their aptitudes. If they survive until the spring of their senior year, they must run a gauntlet of monsters through the gymnasium to escape the Scholomance and find their portals back to the real world.
The survival rate at the school has been pretty poor until Galadriel Higgins (“El” to her friends) and Orion Lake appear on the scene with some superior mal-fighting abilities and new ideas about how to manage monsters. Antagonists at first (as nearly everyone at the school is in this dog-eat-dog environment), they slowly begin to form alliances. One of the joys of the novels is to see how the fiercely independent El gradually comes to see who she can trust and whose talents align best with hers. Alliances in the Scholomance are truly life-and-death decisions, since trusting anyone in an environment in which people are played against one another for survival is a serious thing. While the purported reason for the existence of the Scholomance is to give the young people a fighting chance in the mal-infested world to which, if they’re lucky, they’ll be returning, it usually seems the school itself is rigged against them. When El’s class decides to follow her lead in working cooperatively to kill mals, things take a different turn, though not everyone is sold on the idea.
El, Orion, and their fellow students have the fight of their lives in The Last Graduate, and the build-up to and execution of their graduation exercise is unforgettably exciting and suspenseful. Scholomance students come from all over the world and bring with them the political struggles and rivalries of life as we know it, of New York and London, of Beijing and Dubai. In addition to being mal-fighting warriors, though, the students are also teenagers and experience the normal issues of adolescent angst sandwiched in between the flashy heroics.
Somehow the author maintains a buoyant tone that carries you through the horrors of the Scholomance, and in the final book, The Golden Enclaves, you get to see what a Scholomance education buys you, in case you were thinking of enrolling. I probably wouldn’t agree with my local library on a lot of things, but I do agree with their categorization of this trilogy as science fiction. It’s too much like the real world to come across as fantasy. Although it’s full of magic and spells, it maintains a businesslike approach to realpolitik while also making a daring case for idealism. An uneasy cross between a junior United Nations and a penal colony, the Scholomance may actually succeed in what it sets out to do but at a cost. We can surely say the same about some of our own devil's bargains.
This would make a smashing TV series, so I hope someone gifted ends up bringing this to the screen. (See, just a couple of years of Netflix and I’m already leaning into “Let’s get this streaming so I can watch it from the comfort of my couch. And bring me a bowl of popcorn while you’re at it.”) Yes, I’m all about the hygge these days.
