A Deadly Education
A Deadly Education is the first volume of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, published in 2020. The Scholomance is a deliberately Spartan magical institution suspended outside ordinary spacetime, built by an alliance of magical enclaves in the late nineteenth century to give wizard children a place safer than the open world during the years when their growing power makes them irresistible bait for the soul-eating creatures called maleficaria. The school has no teachers and no graduation ceremony. Students are assigned classes, fed, and supplied by the building itself, and they must fight or trade their way out through the maleficaria-infested graduation hall on their last day inside. Galadriel Higgins, called El, is a half-Welsh, half-Indian senior whose unusually rich affinity for destructive magic makes her capable, if she lets herself be, of building dark fortresses and razing cities. She has resolved not to let herself be. Her fellow student Orion Lake, the school's teen savior, will not stop saving her.
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What you might want to know about A Deadly Education
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
El is a senior at the Scholomance, a wizard school with no teachers and no graduation, where students survive class to class against soul-eating monsters. She has the affinity to raze cities, and the school's golden boy keeps saving her.
Yes. A Deadly Education is the first book in Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, followed by The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves. The series is complete.
A Deadly Education is sold as adult fantasy but is widely read by older teens. There is no explicit content. The dark school setting and frequent character deaths make it more intense than most YA, but readers 14 and up generally handle it.
A Deadly Education was written by Naomi Novik, published in 2020 by Random House Publishing Group.
A Deadly Education is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Deadly Education takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
A Deadly Education is a standalone novel by Naomi Novik, not part of a series.
A Deadly Education is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
