I love to reread, and I reread favorite books all the time:
- When I’m feeling down.
- When I want an audiobook to listen to but don’t want to have to pay attention.
- When I’m in between books and just want to read something I know I’ll like.
- When I’m reading the newest book in a series and want to go back and see what happened before.
- Just because I miss an old favorite and want to read it again.
But it’s been awhile since I reread a book that I’d just read for the first time, simply because it was so good I wanted to go through and experience it again.
My mom gave me Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education for Christmas, and while I expected to enjoy it (I’ve enjoyed both of the other Novik books I read, Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and I hope to go back and reread each at some point), I did not expect to be drawn into it as thoroughly as I was. [P.S. For any of my students reading–this book is reviewed for grades 10 and up, so check in with your parents before seeking out this story. Sorry!] I’m not a super fast reader, and as a school librarian, I feel the need to keep reading new (at least, new to to me) books so that I have more books to recommend to my students, so I put it aside and tried to pick up the next book on my pile.
But I just couldn’t stop thinking about El (short for Galadriel) and A Deadly Education, so I finally gave in and sat down to reread it.
In brief, this story is about a school of magic (the Scholomance), but unlike at Hogwarts, the students spend most of their time trying not to get eaten by all the monsters (“maleficaria” or “mals”) that spend their lives working their way into the school via drains, vents, stairwells, any passage they can find, to get to the tasty young wizards. The only reason wizards send their kids here is the students are ever so slightly less likely to get eaten in the Scholomance than out in the regular world. But, as in every society, there are haves and have nots in wizard society, and the haves (kids whose families belong to “enclaves” outside of school) come in with more resources and a much greater likelihood of surviving.
El is a have not. She grew up with just her mom in a commune in Wales (a regular-human commune, not a wizard enclave), and it’s always been just the two of them. El is an enormously powerful wizard, but in this world, no matter powerful you are, you have to have some kind of magical fuel (“mana”) to work with. There are ways to build up mana (El does a lot of push-ups and crochet), there are ways to store mana, and there are ways to take mana from other living things. Except, in the last case, you are taking “malia,” and it starts to turn you evil and eventually that takes its toll on your own body.
El’s big problem is that her talent (her “affinity”) is geared toward death and destruction (and somehow everyone can sense this, so nobody likes her), but she was raised better than that, so she spends a lot of extra energy making sure she doesn’t do anything that’s not “strict mana” in her methods of getting the power she needs.
And it takes so much energy to just keep going.
Aside from the fascinating world-building (which became much easier to understand on a reread), El as a character is sympathetic (at least from the reader’s vantage point), and some of the challenges she faces are heart-breaking. While the book isn’t perfect (see more on the public controversy below), I don’t think Novik is given quite enough credit for highlighting how systemic inequalities play out in individual lives.
In one instance, El is raging in her room about how some kids from the powerful New York enclave just tried to kill her:
Why did I deserve to live more than them?
But I had an answer now: I hadn’t pulled malia even with a knife in my gut, and I’d gone after a maw-mouth to save half the freshmen instead of running away, and meanwhile Magnus had tried to murder me because Orion liked me, and Todd had destroyed Mika because he was scared, and because I had that answer, I couldn’t help thinking actually I did deserve to live more than them. And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn’t count for a thing, but the point was, I now felt deep in my heart that I was in fact a better human being than Magnus or Todd, and hooray, all the prizes for me, but that wasn’t helpful when what I actually needed was reasons why I shouldn’t just wipe them out of existence.
And she keeps not using her ability to hurt others, even though it’s making it harder to survive herself–how many of us make that choice in our daily lives? I may not be able to wipe out a room of people with a flick of my wrist, but how often do I go out of my way to make sure of someone else’s survival at my expense?
And I find this next passage to be an especially poignant criticism of our systemic inequalities (in El’s world, it’s the enclaves; in ours, it usually manifests itself as systemic racism or systemic ways of keeping wealth with the wealthy):
I still want to live. I want Mum to live. And I’m not going to live if I try to go it alone. So I should show off and make clear to all the enclavers that I’m available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals–to take out another enclave–to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe.
That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe…
So many of us just want to live our lives and be safe. But who am I pushing into the dark (whether I acknowledge it or not) for that safety? No wonder I couldn’t stop thinking about the book!
In addition to the serious philosophical pondering that comes up, this is also simply a great adventure fantasy, a good friendship story, and a story with a nice romantic subplot…and it’s got more coming (but due to this ends on a big of a cliff-hanger, I hope you are writing fast, Ms. Novik!).
As I mentioned above, there was controversy about, in particular, Novik’s reference to locs in a way that perpetuates stereotypes of traditionally Black hairstyles (for which she apologized and made arrangements to change in future editions), and in general about her description of people of different ethnic and language groups.
I think these two articles do a good job of explaining the criticism and giving their view on why A Deadly Education is still worth reading:
A Response to Claims of Racism in Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education by Namera Tanjeem
The Intersectionality of Magical Academia: A Review of Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education from A Naga of the Nusantara, also posted on Reddit
However, my point in writing about A Deadly Education is to share how much I enjoyed the book, how much it kept me thinking, and how it reminded me that it’s a perfectly worthwhile use of reading time to reread a good book.
I know that, as parents, teachers, and librarians, we often encourage kids to try new books (which I also do, especially when they only like to read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and they’ve all been checked out!). But I appreciated the reminder to the adult me of how much joy there is in rereading a book just because of how thoroughly I enjoyed the experience, and how deeply I was drawn into another world.
May we all be so lucky in our reading.
Small Things 