A Deadly Education

A Deadly Education is a fantasy novel from award-winning author Naomi Novik. It is the first novel in a planned trilogy and was published in September 2020. The novel falls within the Young Adult and fantasy genres. It features magic within a contemporary, urban setting.

A Deadly Education received mixed reviews, with some critics praising its nuance and more realistic approach to the dangers of a magical school and others describing it as forced and its main character as unlikeable. The novel was a finalist for the 2021 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Universal Studios has optioned the trilogy for a potential film adaptation.

The novel received some criticism about its representations of race and ethnicity. Galadriel, the novel’s protagonist, is half Welsh and half Indian, but she is estranged from her Indian relatives. Some readers found this disappointing and uncomfortable. Others have pointed out that El’s infrequent and poor personal hygiene reinforces stereotypes about Indian people. In an earlier edition of the novel, Novik additionally wrote that dreadlocks—a traditionally Black hair style—were particularly susceptible to infestation by magical bugs. Following this criticism, Novik made a public apology and removed the passage from future editions.

Plot Summary

Galadriel is in her third year at the Scholomance, an unusual school of magic that is partially sentient, partially constructed in a mysterious void, and partially infested with maleficaria (mals), which are magical creatures that make a meal of many of the students every year. Galadriel, who goes by El, is a half-Welsh, half-Indian loner with an affinity for dark magic. She works hard for every scrap of “mana,” or honestly earned power, to fuel her spells, despite how easy it would be for her to pull “malia,” the life force of others, to do her magic.

El’s father died in the Scholomance’s dangerous graduation ceremony, leaving El’s pregnant mother to raise their child alone. When El was a little over a year old, her mother tracked down her father’s family in an enclave—a magical community—in India. Though they were originally welcoming, El’s grandmother promptly received a prophecy about young El: She would “bring death and destruction to all of the enclaves in the world if she wasn’t stopped” (314). El’s father’s family attempted to kill her to prevent this, but El’s mother protected her and retreated to a small commune in Wales to raise El.

El’s entire life has been full of people who feared or avoided her. She was an outsider in the commune, an outsider in the mundane school she went to, and an outsider in the Scholomance. Friendless and alone, El has to remain constantly vigilant about lurking mals, hover for protection at the margins of larger groups, and perform taxing physical and mental labor to build and store mana for spells and her eventual graduation. Things start to change in El’s junior year, when she catches the attention of Orion Lake, the school’s notorious mal-fighting hero. At first, Orion thinks El is a maleficer who is using malia to fuel her spells. When Orion discovers Jack, the real maleficer, standing over El’s body with a knife, he dispatches Jack and helps El use some of her mother’s healing magic to heal her stab wound and save her life.

After this, they are reluctant friends. El has an abstract idea that she can use Orion’s friendship to earn a spot in an enclave, but she quickly grows to like and value him too much to do so. She realizes that Orion is just as isolated as she is—though people see Orion as a hero and El as a dark witch, no one sees either of them as a real person with feelings and wants of their own. They form a relationship based on insults and banter; they are just friends, but the other students assume they are dating. Orion’s presence is enough of a draw that El is able to forge working relationships and then friendships with two other girls in their grade: Aadhya, who is strategic and adept at the trading that keeps the school running; and Liu, who has been dabbling in malia to survive school and has a difficult reckoning with herself. They form an official graduation alliance.

El continues to be hostile toward the enclave kids, who she recognizes to be at the top of an intentionally designed social pyramid that allows them to trade the possibility of an enclave spot for the loyalty, help, and protection of the independent students. Orion’s group, the New York enclave, are anxious about his new attachment to El, whom they find rude and off-putting. They attempt two minor attacks on El—a crawler designed to drain her of the malia they think she’s storing and a sleeping spell they leave on her usual study desk. Other students are being more friendly to El, but she knows it is only because they think she’s their way to get to Orion. Despite her increasing sadness and resentment over her isolation, El risks her life to single-handedly take down a maw-mouth that has found its way into the school. The maw-mouth is a rare and incredibly powerful mal, one that groups of adult wizards have tried, and failed, to conquer. El is so powerful that she is able to kill it single-handedly in the span of a few minutes. The experience is traumatizing and ultimately private, as no one is around to see her do it. Her only reward is a rare book she finds during the attack, one that contains ancient and powerful spells that were used to build the first enclaves.

Rumors of the maw-mouth, an increase in mal activity, and the fear of impending graduation brings everything to a head in the school. Orion has saved so many students from being eaten by mals that the mals are now starving and trying to break into the school. The seniors know that they will face a hall full of unusually aggressive mals when the graduation ceremony begins in a week. A group of them attempts to break open a vulnerable wall in the school to allow the mals in to feed on the younger students, hoping that this will mean there are fewer hungry mals to overcome during the graduation ceremony. El, Aadhya, Liu, Orion, and a couple of other students painstakingly repair the wall, but they know the seniors will just try something else.

The senior valedictorian, Clarita, approaches them in the dining hall after this and announces that it’s not fair for the senior class to have to graduate alone this year and face the build-up of mals. She says they’ve thought about forcing the juniors to graduate with them so the losses will be spread over two classes. Some people also think that Orion alone should graduate with them. Another idea is that someone—by “someone,” they clearly mean Orion—should go down into the graduation hall and repair the machinery that is supposed to cleanse the hall with mortal fire before the ceremony. El seizes on this idea as the one most likely to leave Orion alive; she says that it must be a group of students who go together to the graduation hall to do the repairs. She volunteers to go and insists that the rest of the team should consist of the most skilled seniors, as that will give them the best chance of repairing the machinery and coming out of it alive. Several enclaves offer a guaranteed spot to anyone who goes on the mission.

The group, a team of incanters, artificers, and maintenance-track kids, all make their way down to the machinery on the morning of graduation. They lose two students to the mals but do manage to repair the machinery before graduation starts. El and Orion get trapped in the hallways and are almost killed by mortal flame before El puts up a circle of mortal flame of her own, which operates as a firebreak and keeps them safe. Before she can do the spell, Orion kisses her. Afterwards, El flees to scrounge supplies from the newly stocked workshop. That evening, Orion and El talk and agree that they like each other but will just be friends until after graduation. The incoming freshmen bring mail with them every year, though El never receives any because she and her mother do not have alliances with other wizards. This year, however, she gets a message from her mother; it tells her to stay away from Orion Lake.