A review by debatably_relavent
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

adventurous lighthearted fast-paced

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

3.0

I read A Deadly Education last year and quite enjoyed it (and Novik’s unrelated Spinning Silver is just one of my favourite low fantasy books full stop so she has quite a bit of my trust), so I finally got around to putting in a hold request for the sequel. Broadening your horizons and reading outside your comfort zone means swimming through 400 pages of YA a couple times a year, right? Anyway, despite only barely remembering who anyone but El and Orion were when I went into this, was a fun read! 

The book picks up more or less directly where A Deadly Education stops – with the horrible murderous monster-infested extradimensional wizard high school’s cleansing machinery repaired for the first time in generations, and the place therefor incredibly less monster-infested than previously. El, prophesied future dark lady of the apocalypse with a savant’s talent for specifically the sort of magic you cast after cackling and before someone puts a sword in you, doesn’t get to enjoy that much – her senior year seems destined to be spent being the target of just about every monster that’s left. Eventually you really have to wonder if the school is trying to kill you – and that question is where the plot really starts to go off. 

So I said it before, but this is very much YA. I don’t mean that as an insult, or even a marker of quality, just that it’s a book from the perspective of a 17 year old looking down the end of high school and clearly written to provide a relatable emotional reality for an assumed audience of the same. So El sometimes acts like a cartoon character, and is pathologically incapable of expressing her emotions coherently or expressing affection for the guy she likes in any sane manner, and is far more blase about murder attempts and soul-eating monsters than emotionally awkward conversations – but honestly all that just rings as pretty true to life. Deeply aggravating at times, and her internal monologue and all its snark and doublethink does occasionally grate a bit, but overall it really works. She’s just a fun character to spend time in the head of, (and far less irritating in basically every way than she was in the last book. So hey, maturity!). 

The emotional beats were all pretty simple and clearly telegraphed, and it isn’t exactly a book that requires you to sit down and ponder deep symbolism or metaphor to comprehend, but the pacing is tight and it’s very readable. The prose isn’t really anything to write home about – especially knowing what Novik can do when she decides to get fancy and show off a bit – but it very clear and just dripping with El’s personality on every page. I read this at the same time as I was picking through an incredibly dense and citation-heavy historical reader, and the contrast made me very appreciative of those virtues. 

Character-wise – well, there’s El, and Orion (love interest, single-minded and near divinely-ordained monster hunter, golden boy of the most powerful enclave in the world), and there’s El’s few close friends, and then there’s a cast of dozens of students with maybe one memorable character trait who kind of drift in and out of the narrative as required. The amount of nuance and exploration someone gets drops off dramatically with each step down the list you go. Most of the cast shows up precisely when required and is more or less forgotten about directly afterwards – which does sell this being a school with over a thousand students in it! But the number of characters who really feel real drops off pretty rapidly. 

(Also like, I assume it just comes down to social progress in the 2010s coming at you fast, but you really get the sense that at some point between the books getting written the publishers sent down a memo that you were allowed to say queer people existed now.) 

Even more than Deadly Education, this is a book without any sort of singular villain, or even really any consistent antagonists. Some of the other students are assholes, sure, but the book’s whole thesis is that no one is that murderous or awful for the sake of it – they are because they’re rats in a cage, convinced that amoral self-interest and husbanding and acquiring every resource they can is the only hope they have of maybe living to see their families again. Offered a chance to do good, to actually change things for the better and help everyone without getting themselves killed in the process, just about everyone takes it. Even the semi-intelligent school itself gets in on it by the end, pressing the senior class to figure something out and make it obsolete – and the whole conflict of the final act is how and whether everyone will. 

El and Orion can both kill basically arbitrarily large numbers of monsters (or people), so the monster-killing is never really where the book finds its drama either. I mean, both do a lot of it through the climax, but the actual tension mostly comes down to crowd management and logistics and whether everyone else is as committed to this as the two of them are. 

As for what they’re struggling against – so like, this isn’t Divergent, by the standards of the YA I read in high school, the social commentary is both subtle and nuanced. But I mean, it’s also a story where highschool is four years or murder-hell-prison and justified only because it’s barely the lesser of two evils, and also a story where the poor and marginalized are only kept around more-or-less explicitly as ablative bodies for the kids the powers that be care about, with their only hope of good life being so impressive and useful to those kids that they try to bring them along when they ascend back up to the gilded paradise that is their birthright. So like, not that subtle. 

As far as teenage romances go (which, for me, really isn’t very fair at all), El and Orion’s was surprisingly tolerable. It helps that they’re both actually deeply profoundly weird about it, and also that the book didn’t try to milk any drama out of will-they/won’t-they stuff or a love triangle. The ‘and they have sex for the first time the night before the final climactic struggle where one or both of them could very well die’ did feel right out of an old bioware game, though. (Also I’m just a sucker for tragedy and ironic mirroring/repetition, so the ending was great for me). 

Look forward to finishing the series whenever I get around to it sometime in the fall.