Nasties lurk in dark corners of a wizard world

Adeadly Education bynaominovik, Penguin Randomhouse, $37

.. .. .. ..

.. .. .. El (short for Galadriel) Higgins is a young wizard learninghow to be awizard as well as harness herown awesome power. Astudent of the Scholomance she lives in aworld of no teachers, holidays or friendships, only alliances, strategy and/or death.

In a kind of anti-hogwarts, author Naomi Novik conjures aworld where young wizards spend their days fighting “mals”—“six-armed things vaguely like the offspring of an octopus and an iguana”, or agglos, soul-eaters, maw-mouths and sirenspiders— lurking in the corners and dark stairwells. The sometimes hilariously described evil mals routinely eat, kill or melt students with alarming regularity until the survivors graduate by running in amad dash through gates guarded by mawmouthsand “several hundred exceptional horrors”. And the mals aren’t the only ones trying to kill the students: the enemymay also be the classmate plotting in the room next door.

El is not the type of student to form alliances for the sake of it; she is a youngwomanof dark powers that could easily wipe out the mals oozing through the vents and lurking in the cafeteria food. But she could also accidentally kill all the other students too.

And that is something she wants to avoid. Her struggles are relatable and her observations on her situation honest and wry.

The constant death and destruction and the knife-edge existence of El and her schoolmates in the Scholomance gets a bit boring after awhile — I kept wondering what kind of parent would let their kids go to a school where they were unlikely to survive.

But Deadly Education is written for teenagers and younger readersmayget more enjoyment out of El as she battles the never-ending stream of monsters.

AS the book continueswelearn not justhow the school works, buthow the world outside it works, with its enclaves and mundanes, as people without powers are known. It’s also about howpower concentrated in the hands of the few limits the opportunities for the many, but howco-operation by the manycreates a fairer and more just society for everyone.

For the teenage audience, however, I suspect the stream of gruesome and disgusting mals will keep them reading until the end.

— Helen vanberkel