Reviews with content warning for Death - Scholomance - Die goldenen Enklaven

This was a fitting conclusion to this trilogy and it did not disappoint. I felt this installment was more event driven compared to the previous two books. The first half of the story focuses a lot on investigating a threat to the enclaves. El has quite a few internal demons she needs to battle on her own both secondary to her loss of Orion and the prophecy that has haunted her since childhood. We finally get to explore the enclaves around the world and the complex politics involved. There is a lot of ethical questions that are brought up with how the enclaves obtain their mana and how they choose to distribute and use it. It's almost like watching different mafia families fight over power, sometimes via less than moral means.

We get to meet the families of a lot of the main and side characters we've gotten to know since book 1. Some of them are worse than others in terms of being terrible people. Even outside of the Scholomance it is clear that there is a mentality of "survival of the fittest". Mages are trying to get the best advantages to survive at the expense of others most of the time. El, through her actions, has found a semblance of respect among the Enclaves. This helps her have leverage in terms of changing some of the systemic ways in which the hierarchy of power is oppressive and immoral.

The tensions are high in this last book. All of it, thankfully, has a great pay off. The build up at the beginning is slower, but there wasn't a moment where I wasn't interested in finding out what was going to happen next. I'm looking forward to reading more series by Novik. This one has been great.

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missmali's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

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queenie_ofthe_void's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Not sure how I feel about the ending and the pacing. It seemed like this could have been two books, and a lot of side characters fell by the wayside (Chloe, Magnus, Liu, etc). For a final book with a lot of ground to cover, I felt too much time was spent building a relationship between Liesel and El. Not the relationship itself, but that time could've been used to a better purpose. REALLY not happy with how things ended for Orion. His entire arc was learning how to be a 'person' and not 'a hero who kills monsters' but then ended up choosing to spend his life away from loved ones and killing monsters full time. Disappointing tbh.

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trips's review against another edition

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adventurous dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

It just....wasn't a very good conclusion to this series.
The cliff hanger at the end of the 2nd book of course made readers race to get this book, only to be met with a lot of...info dumps that felt unnecessary with it being the finale book, traversing the world with a lot of El angst that was understandable but a bit much, and a conclusion that felt like "ehm...thats it?" in my opinion.

I don't have any problem with El's

foray into a kinda weird sapphic sex relationship with Liesl. I thought it was more amusing than anything because Liesl wanted her harem but in the end, El got more of one (lol).

What I didn't like is that I couldn't feel anything for Orion. I wanted to, what he had done to him was awful but it just wasn't written in a way where I truly felt like "wow this poor kid" instead it was like "well, he seems to be doing ok" (and I don't like that! I should've been crying after it was revealed what

Ophelia

did to him but it just didn't work for me. With that, the villain also fell flat, perhaps because they weren't there all that much, or because of everything written above.

Disappointing, I feel most sad for all the people who love El and Orion together as they got so little in this book!

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dabow's review against another edition

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adventurous funny hopeful tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

My life is different now. Novik is directly up my alley and into my lizard brain.

This book also feels extremely relevant to our current moment, for all that it's about wizard kids who don't know how to use phones. It's also about the little ways we hurt everyone and how we justify it to ourselves, and about how ultimately it's not justifiable. I'm in a daze thinking about climate change and capitalism after finishing this book (and series) and I probably will be for weeks.

This would make an excellent double-feature with "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

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mayabaxx's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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mairead_parade's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I really enjoyed this series and thought this was a clever and satisfying final book, with some serious emotional gut punches. Novik forces her characters to grow up and reckons with the true costs and inequalities of the society she's imagined in a much more real way than a lot of other teen magic fantasy, which I appreciated. This series also escalates the “big bad” from book to book in an interesting and surprising way that changed my perspective on the previous installments.

My main quibbles are that the ending is a little too tidy, especially in contrast to a lot of the more brutal choices Novik makes in the rest of the series. El and Orion also spent very little on-page time together, which made sense in terms of the plot, but I lost some of the investment in their relationship that I had at the end of book two.

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