Recommendations
Books Like The Scholomance
A magic school designed to kill you — and a girl who was supposed to be worse than that
Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is the first book in the Scholomance trilogy. The Scholomance is a school for magical students that is designed to produce graduates by killing everyone else — no teachers, no staff, no protection except what students can build for themselves from their courses. El (Galadriel) has a prophesied ability to cause mass death, which everyone around her assumes means she will become a dark mage. She is very tired of being assumed about. The novel is narrated by El in a voice that is one of the most distinctive in recent YA fantasy — caustic, precise, and often very funny about things that are terrible. If the mordant heroine, the death-trap school, the slow-burn romance with an annoyingly competent savior, and the world-building that works out what magical student debt actually is gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Carry On
by Rainbow Rowell
A chosen hero's final year at a magical school, from the perspective of a protagonist who doesn't fit what the prophecy demands — Rowell and Novik both write magical school protagonists who are suspicious of the institution they're in, and both novels are in direct conversation with Harry Potter about what it would actually be like to have magic as a survival requirement.
- 2Buy
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
A Deadly Education is partly a direct response to Harry Potter's magical school premise — Novik has said she started writing the Scholomance by asking what a magic school would actually be like if the administration couldn't protect students from danger. Reading both is the full context.
- 3Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Clarke and Novik both write fantasy in which magic is a system with rules and consequences, and both are interested in what it means to be the person in the room whose relationship to those rules is most unusual. El's relationship to the Scholomance's curriculum and Strange's relationship to English magic are built on the same premise.
- 4Buy
Legendborn
by Tracy Deonn
A girl arrives at a campus institution and discovers that the secret society hidden inside it has a history she is directly connected to — Deonn and Novik both write protagonists who are told by the institution what they are, and who spend the novel finding out whether that's true.
- 5Buy
The Folk of the Air
by Holly Black
A protagonist who everyone in her world assumes is dangerous, who survives by being smarter than everyone around her expects — El's relationship to the Scholomance is built on the same fuel as Jude's relationship to Faerie: a world designed to exclude you that needs you more than it will admit.
- 6Buy
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
A found family of morally complicated teenagers doing something impossible — Kaz Brekker and El are similar characters: people who use intelligence as their primary weapon, who mistrust warmth because their environments have never made it safe, and who are surprised by the relationships they find themselves in.
- 7Buy
Uprooted
by Naomi Novik
Novik's own earlier standalone novel — a girl in a village that gives a Dragon one girl every ten years to serve him discovers that the sacrifice is not what it seems and that the forest's evil is more complicated than anyone has admitted. Uprooted has A Deadly Education's same sense of a magical system with dangerous rules and a female protagonist who understands those rules better than she should.
- 8Buy
The Atlas Six
by Olivie Blake
Six magical students selected for a secret society with a lethal final year — Blake and Novik both write magical institutions that kill their students as a feature, not a bug, and both are interested in what that does to the people competing inside those institutions.
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