Reviews tagging 'Death'

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

106 reviews

ashley_reya's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

The masterful world building that Novik gets to display in this story was blowing my mind left and right. It truly feels like a completion to the Scholomance Series.

El, Orion, Aadhya, Liu, and even Liesel have a part of my heart with this story. ❤️

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sweets's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I read the scollomance series this week and after just finishing the last book i took a shower to think about it (and wash some Maw-mouth off). After the first 2 books i thought this was going to be a 5 star read for me for i had enjoyed myself a lot during the first 2 books. Reading the last book i had prepered myself to be devestated and cry my eyes out as was the setup from the sequel however, this just did not happen for me. After reading the first 2 books i thought the story was heading for an eppic end. And yes the end was pretty memorabele but also a little bit to clean for my liking. The hole story went on a return to balace and karma route. You reap what you sow in theorie. In practice that meant i think some of these caracters should have pand a higher price. So i enjoyed the series a lot but in a world of three books that has been so torturous for our students im a little disapointed by how NICE everything wraped up. 

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searchandrescueteam's review

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

This is the final of the Scholomance trilogy and I read it in about two days (I was on leave!).  I think if you have read the previous two books - your understanding of the Scholomance world is deeper, but it’s not essential to reading this book.  Understanding the extremes of the Scholomance world certainly helps understanding of the characters’ motivations, actions and frustrations.
Again, the author works with the complexities of friendships, alliances, cliques, conspiracies.  Another layer is added - as she walks through power (its use and abuse) and hierarchies.  The impact of a single person, with and without the support of others (a few and many) gives the reader much to reflect on.
It’s not a gentle book, not a walk-in-the-park.  But I was glad to read it.

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bookswithcuppatea's review

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adventurous dark emotional tense 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? It's complicated

5.0

An extraordinary final book in the Scholomance series! We finally get to meet the families of a lot of the characters from books 1 and 2, and see more breadth of the characters we've gotten to know. El's Mum in particular, it was brilliant to finally meet her!

The enclaves are so much more complex even than I'd anticipated. El and her fellow graduating classmates are in that awkward intermediate state of being out of school but not yet being treated as adults.

So many questions were answered in this book, and yet there are quite a few plot turns that surprised me.

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christinereads1823's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense 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

5.0

Stellar ending to the trilogy. The major plot twist/reveal was so well done, I read it and suddenly EVERYTHING from the previous books made sense. Novik's characters leap off the page and into your heart. El, as someone who is told by the universe that they're destined to be evil and bring destruction to the world and they say no, I will do right and keep saying it over and over again, and her steadfast friends will stay with me for a long, long time. 

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louise_french_rider's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging 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

What a series ! One of my favorite for sure, I really enjoyed every single book.
This book is full of plot twists we weren't prepared for. The end is quite unexpected, I had lots of fun reading it.
I like the characters development and the relationships are well developed. I still don't get why there's this lgbtqia + passage, it is unnecessary and adds nothing to the series, it feels like it's there to say we checked the box "Reaching the lgbtqia+ community". Apart from that, I would have liked a more developed relationship with Orion, it feels like he's there but not really there, which we can understand at the beginning but in the last chapters is confusing.
Overall, it is well written, you don't get bored while reading it, there's always a storyline making you want to turn the next page.
Congrats for this amazing series !

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pj99's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75


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beatriks's review against another edition

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

3.5

What can I say?
I’ll have to wrap most of my review in spoilers. Without spoiling anything, this book comes with some surprises that I liked, the world building is still amazing. El’s narration can be really funny:
So I followed her back to the yurt and let Mum give me a bowl of vegetable soup that tasted like it had been made with real vegetables, which might not sound very exciting to you, but what do you know. 

Overall, I had a 2 year break in between book 2 and 3, that probably didn’t help. 

Good points:
The prophecy and how that turned out in the end, with the visit in Mumbai.
The whole enclave-building principle is genius
I like the “you’re already dead” principle

Less satisfying points 
The way things ended with Orion doesn’t really satisfy me.
The way things end in the well. 

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nerdy_reader_9571's review against another edition

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adventurous dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

While I was glad that this third installment took place in locations other than the one that the previous two took place in, the story felt rushed and almost like two books compressed into one. There were a lot of events jam-packed into this one book with roughly the same amount of constant exposition and world-building as the first two installments in the series. 

Overall, though, I enjoyed reading it, and I thought that everything within the story fit the lore of the first two books well and provided a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

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kelisabeth's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5


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