The Last Graduate

The Last Graduate (Scholomance 2) by Naomi Novik

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RTH1HUIVXTRQI?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

This is book two in Naomi Novik's Scholomance series.

In the first book, we were introduced to the Scholomance, an isolated educational facility where teenage wizards are confined for four years. Apparently, the world is so populated by evil, manna-consuming, entities, aka “mals”, who love the sweet taste of young wizards that wizard society has to exile its youngsters to a school where they can avoid the 9 out of 10 death rate in the real world. Unfortunately, the Scholomance is also infested with mals, so the death rate in the Scholomance is 3 out of 4.

The real death purge comes at graduation when seniors try to run across graduation hall, which has become thoroughly infested with mals. Consequently, all of the Scholomance activities are directed to learning to be one of the few survivors of the death race across the hall.

In the first book, we were introduced to Galadriel. El was at the low end of the social ladder as a loner “loser.” But El knows something no one knows, she's actually an incredibly gifted “Malificer,” a wizard with the ability to use dark magic. Where other kids are learning spells for cleaning their rules, El is being given spells on destroying armies and cities.

In book one, we see El start to move up the social ladder as she makes a few friends and begins to associate with Orion Lake. Orion is a hero - the unique individual with the ability to kill mals and the generous spirit to do so without being asked.

The second book picks up where the first book ended. At the close of the first book, El and her friends had helped the graduating seniors fix the machinery that cleansed the graduation hall of vermin. In this book, El is now a senior and must deal with her last year at the Scholomance, the question of what her class will discover in the graduation hall, what is to be done about the younger kids, and her own feelings about Orion.

The story makes for a gripping fun read as El intelligently and sarcastically negotiates her last year of the high school from Hell.

There will be a third book, so we may follow El out into the adult world.