A review by bluejayreads
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

adventurous dark
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book has so many problems. I have read several of Naomi Novik’s books so far, and compared to the meticulously-plotted and deftly told previous books that I’ve read, this one is definitely a weaker story. But … Well, I’ll get there. 

I like lists, so let’s have a list of the most glaring problems I can remember off the top of my head. 

  • El is even more absurdly powerful than she was in the last book, but doesn’t seem to be surprised by or even notice it, and it doesn’t even cross her mind to question why. I don’t even know if the story wants that question asked, but I want to know why she’s so powerful.
  • There’s apparently a whole enchanted gymnasium where many students exercise that somehow never got brought up in book one.
  • Neither did a bunch of framed news articles that are apparently all over the school and are critical to the plot now.
  • I never got the sense in book one that the school was fantastically big and yet there’s apparently a thousand graduating seniors. 
  • There’s supposed to be a thing about lingering trauma from El’s experience with the mormouth last book, but the climactic moment of that plot thread ended up very anti-climactic.
  • Several threads from book one that either get dropped entirely or get shoved to the background with no warning or mention.
 
Most of these problems are continuity issues from the previous book, and none of these are “you only notice if you think about it too hard” issues – they were all glaringly obvious to me while reading. And yet with all those obvious issues, I’m going to come back and say that I loved this book.
 
The main reason for this is that I absolutely adore the trope of the protagonist being so much more powerful than everyone else and all the people around them being repeatedly astonished as they discover bit-by-bit how absurdly powerful the protagonist is. The Last Graduate is that trope incarnate. In book one El by herself kills a monster that previously had only been killed by a group of ten of the world’s top magicians. In this book she is stronger. I cannot put into words how much fun it was to watch her go from being an overlooked non-Enclave kid to the absolute most powerful kid in school and probably the only way most of them are getting out alive.

I can’t say I entirely enjoyed El’s kinda-romance thing with Orion Lake, but I didn’t hate it and it was brief enough that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. There were also some interesting questions raised about Orion and how his magic works. I’m wondering if there’s some underlying reason that there are two absurdly powerful magical teenagers the same age that will get explained in book three.
 
Yeah, the book has problems. I won’t deny that, and those will probably be detrimental to your enjoyment if you don’t love the overpowered character trope. But I do love that trope and so I still thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I’m very much looking forward to book three.
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