Deadly Education

Anissa Dadia does an excellent job as narrator keeping you interested in a book that starts out featuring an angsty teenage dark mage who is in a terrible place by force. Naomi Novik deserves credit for setting up such a difficult task as an author. But as things progress, and the book wins the reader over, we get to see Novik’s ability to subtly include allegory on a number of real world social ills. That and some very nice language work… plus a very good ending making me get the second volume right away. 4.5 stars rounded up!

A lot of reviewers complained reasonably that the worldbuilding is pretty unbelievable at times, but I was having too much fun to notice.

I loved the big gimmick underlying the whole book: the protagonist has the talents and affinities to be the most powerful and destructive necromancer of her generation - there’s even prophecies about her! - but she was raised by pacifist hippies and works incredibly hard not to accidentally incinerate or mind-control her classmates, building power not by sacrificing animals but through push-ups and crochet.