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I read A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves in quick succession while on vacation this summer. I’m glad I didn’t start reading until after The Golden Enclaves became available, given the cliffhanger endings in the first two books. Some general comments:

The Scholomance is leaning into all the things that, seen from a certain angle, make Hogwarts frankly horrifying: the ruthless competition among the houses, the overtly dangerous environs of the school (e.g. the forbidden forest), the casual use of spells that can cause serious injuries. More generally, it’s solving in a particularly drastic way the typical YA problem of keeping adults out of the way so that teenagers have to save the world (more on this below).   And as others have pointed out, it’s an inversion of the Chosen One trope: I’d say both El and Orion are, in different ways, Chosen Ones with a dark twist. 

On a personal note, S started kindergarten last week, which gave me some extra sympathy for the poor Scholomance parents. “Say goodbye to your kids now! You’ll see them again after four harrowing years without contact, in the unlikely event that they escape being eaten by monsters!”



So, obviously, one of the first questions that occurred to me was, “How can there be a school without teachers?” But of course that’s not quite correct: there is one teacher. It will probably not surprise anyone to learn that I found the Scholomance itself to be the most interesting “character,” if I can call it that. At one point, El says something like, “You’re probably wondering who grades our assignments.” Well, yes, I was wondering that, but I was even more curious to know who makes up the assignments. There’s no question which of those two activities requires more intelligence and creativity. And it seems very unlikely that the school is just pulling from some library of pre-loaded assignments, given that it’s dynamically adjusting all the time to give what it decides is relevant to each student. The Scholomance has got to be an incredibly sophisticated magical AI. It got some initial “programming” from the wizards who first set it up, and perhaps it gets an update from time to time, but essentially it’s on its own to decide how best to teach and train several thousand magical teenagers. (It probably looks like I have some sort of weird AI fixation, since this is now my second post in a row to feature AI-related thoughts. Just a coincidence, really!)

So, is the Scholomance a good teacher? There’s a weird ambiguity about this. On the one hand, those students who survive are acquiring enough skills to convert them from defenseless tender morsels into badass untouchable adult wizards in four years.  There’s some very impressive language learning by El and her classmates on the incantations track, amazing creations by artificers and alchemists, etc. they’re supposedly learning a lot of math—I’d really like to see one of their math classes!  But on the other hand, a significant amount of the class material is said to be boring and useless, like the long droning video lectures in the history classes.  I totally want to see a meeting of the Scholomance Curriculum Committee now. I would imagine they need to have regular meetings every few years, to update the Scholomance on advances in magical theory if nothing else. Otherwise they’d be doing the equivalent of teaching 19th century physics. (For those keeping score at home, I’ve now asked to see a math class and a committee meeting. I’ll take ‘fics that no one else wants to read’ for 500, please, Alex. ). 

It’s an amazing moment when the Scholomance reveals that it’s fully committed to saving “all the wise-gifted children of the world” if it can. It’s another trope inversion—in this case, the trope of “AI turns on its creators and becomes evil” (or does something evil in order to carry out its well-intentioned mission). Instead, we have the AI taking its noble-sounding mission statement more seriously than its creators ever did. 

As a side note, I was wondering if the prophecy about El was going to be another example of a trope inversion. It’s pretty much an ironclad rule that any prophecy appearing in a fantasy/myth/fairy tale is going to be fulfilled, in an unexpected and possibly ironic way. It would be quite something to end up saying, “welp, guess that prophecy was totally wrong after all!”  I suppose that’s nearly impossible to pull off in fiction—mentioning a prophecy of any kind automatically becomes equivalent to Chekhov’s gun, and if it doesn’t “go off,” it’s just boring and anticlimactic.

I’m not sure how to feel about the ending of The Golden Enclaves. I’m happy that the Scholomance gets to continue existing and carrying out its mission. As for Orion, though… it feels like a very ‘have your cake and eat it too’ ending.  I genuinely thought right up until the end that Orion was going to have to die, in a way that I never for one second thought Harry Potter was going to die, for example.  And I mean that as a compliment to the book/series—I really believed in the stakes here. So when El did find a way to save him, it felt like there should be more of a price to pay.  There’s a very clear Orpheus and Eurydice reference when El is leading Orion out of the Scholomance and thinks she can’t turn to look back at him, lest she realize he’s already dead and make him so for good.  This could be seen as another trope inversion, with Eurydice actually making it out of the underworld. But for that to work, I think there should have been more of a price to be paid. When El does whatever it is she does with the sutra spells to make Orion stay, it feels like she should be making a fundamental change in his nature, making him into a sort of human foundation stone. This is an absolutely ridiculous comparison, but I was expecting more of a Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel ending: something where Orion is somehow woven into the fabric of the Scholomance and can never leave.

I also, of course, wanted more detail about what changed for the Scholomance. Apparently the kids get to have summer vacations now, but what else? Will there be regular communication between the students and their families outside? Are they going to revise the curriculum so that it’s not so narrowly focused on surviving mal attacks? In The Last Graduate El made a throwaway comment about how someone with am affinity like water-weaving, which would be incredibly useful in the wider world but doesn’t have many anti-mal applications, would never survive graduation. Will they now have courses designed to help take advantage of that type of talent? Will they now consider bringing in actual human teachers—and how does the Scholomance itself feel about that? Also, are they perhaps going to start doing a teensy bit of outreach for incoming students from non-magical families, so that they’re not just suddenly zapped through a portal with no warning? A lot of potential world building to dig into.