The first book I read in 2026 was A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. It’s the first installment in the Scholomance Trilogy. I picked it up at our local library on a whim. I was there with Sunshine and I checked to see if they had any Novik on the shelf at that moment. When the catalog showed this book – one I hadn’t heard of yet – I went to the stacks and found it. The opening line had me at hello.
“I decided Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.”
Whooooo, that’s a stinger of an opener. It perfectly encapsulates the tone and outlook of our protagonist, Galadriel Higgins (yes, that Galadriel). She witty, sarcastic, and absolutely seething with rage. It’s almost as though Novik had been watching me as a teenager
So I sat in the library and started reading while Sunshine bounced around and eventually chose her books. We took the short trip home, and I continued reading. I let up for dinner and family time, and then I dove back in. Once Sunshine was abed, I gave up the ghost and decided I was going to finish the book. That’s right. All 313 pages read in a single day, and I cackled straight through.
This story is a dark fantasy story about a magic school designed to protect wizard children when they are their most vulnerable to being poached by magic-eating monsters: by locking them all inside a school dangling in a space that doesn’t quite exist – while said magic-eating monsters break through the magical wards and attempt to eat them all.
No teachers. No adults of any kind. Just magically automated classes, and the best teacher of survival: imminent and constant danger.
I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I’ve read it twice now, even, as I have read it aloud to Sunshine (as noted in a previous post), and she was absolutely enraptured.
Summary
Rating (scale of 5 stars): 5 Stars
Lessons: Voice, voice, voice. And heckin’ that first line. Someone saves this girl’s life and all she can think of is how much she wants to bash his head in for doing it (to be fair, she had valid reasons for being very annoyed).
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