A review by bookshelfmystic
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

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

4.25

The third book in an original trilogy has a hard task: it has to take the world that’s been established in the first book, the stakes that have been raised in the second, and all of the characters we’ve come to care about and give it all a satisfying conclusion. The Golden Enclaves gives it a pretty good shot, and mostly succeeds. 

The pacing is the main thing dragging the book down. El saves multiple enclaves from collapse, with similar tactics each time, which drags just a bit. We even go to a couple of the locations twice. It’s a way to see the broader world outside of the Scholomance, which is neat, but I would have appreciated more variety. It felt like Novik was starting to run out of plot ideas. That being said, each sequence sets up El learning new information, and each of the big reveals hit with appropriate horror. Especially that
enclaves are built on crushing a child to eternal deathlessness as a maw-mouth
- the adrenaline in this chapter was already racing, and the revelation feels like a punch in the gut. 

It’s evident that Novik knew where this trilogy was going when she started it. Each of the plot threads was sufficiently wrapped up, even El’s relationship with her family. I didn’t even know I needed the scenes with
El’s grandparents in India, but the depth of her grandfather’s love made me cry
.  We get to spend time with many of the characters we met in the Scholomance and a few fun new ones (though I definitely thought Yancy would be coming back later in the book – they spend a lot of time on her for a one-off character). I even started to like Liesel. My last minor complaint, though, is that I still just don’t really buy El’s feelings for Orion. Especially given what we come to find out, he doesn’t really have much of a personality. I fully buy the tragedy of his story, but the romantic part feels a little thin. But I guess the heart wants what it wants. And it did set up a great, emotional conclusion to the trilogy. 


Miscellaneous thoughts: 

-   I started to suspect that
El was behind the destruction of the enclaves
towards the beginning, especially given the prophecy we’ve heard so much about, but I thought it was
related to her using mana at all
. I definitely didn’t call the
maw-mouths
. 
-  I continue to love El’s mom’s Wiccan-esque approach to magic and how different it is from what we see from every other wizard in the world. 

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