sophia_sol | The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik

Well....I liked it better than the first book in this trilogy. Unfortunately still not my thing though! Like, is it doing lots of things that SHOULD be my thing? It is!

It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities

HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.

I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.

Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.

It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.

(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)

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Yeah, Novik really needed to check those numbers, just run them through a plausibility filter. I'm used to ignoring all SFF numbers on principle, but those are... really, really bad and she keeps mentioning them.

(It could be worse. Spinning Silver has those potatoes. In medieval Europe. Which keep on stubbornly appearing and being potatoes in such a way that I can't mentally edit them to "turnips" instead. I have feelings about potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers in medieval Afroeurasia.)

Yeah the numbers just make NO sense! And when you're trying to keep people from questioning the logic of your numbers, you need to not mention specifics!

Thankfully I'm pretty chill about ahistorical foodstuffs in the fiction I consume, so the potatoes didn't bother me. I just get amused by it :) I love the prominence of potatoes and chili peppers in Fantasy Historical China in the untamed, for example. I'm sorry it threw you out of Spinning Silver so much!

Yeah, this was my reaction as well: liked it more than the first book, but didn't like it as much as I would have expected given a lot of tropes are things I love --ppl who don't like each other working together (I loved everything with Liesel), fighting against the status quo/fate, etc--and it's competently written, and I think it's because the base premise is so obviously artificially constructed that it completely broke my suspension of disbelief. So every time the narration went on a info-dump about how enclaves work or whatever it felt more like I was watching Novik build an intricate Rube Goldberg machine to produce the specific effect she wanted.

exactlyyyyyyyyyyyy, I agree with every single word you've written here (and Liesel! yes! every single thing about her was amazing!)

Your list there is absolutely full of things I like and I am such a big fan of Spinning Silver and Uprooted...but I haven't read any of this series and I'm not sure I will. Enough people whose taste overlaps with mine don't enjoy it.

Spinning Silver is like, legitimately one of the best books I've read in recent years. And this series is so disappointing, coming in the wake of that. Naomi Novik I know you can do better!!

I do have one friend (

cahn) who absolutely adores the Scholomance series, for whom the good things I list do work in this context, which tells me there is room for people with my general taste in books to like these ones... but I'm not going to be the person to hype these books up to you :P

which tells me there is room for people with my general taste in books to like these ones

haha, I suppose that's true, but I was pretty sure when reading this series that you wouldn't like it, because a lot of what I like about it falls squarely in the place where your tastes and mine diverge :)

(I don't find the series disappointing, as you know, but wow I will admit Novik is terrible with her numbers here.)

haha

sophia_sol namechecked me below so I guess I should reply to this :) I really loooooved this book, and liked the series in general, after being extremely skeptical about it. BUT I should say that a) I have had a lot of exposure to YA dystopia because my sister kept force-feeding them to me, b) unlike

sophia_sol I am generally fine with grimdark, and c) I have also had a lot of exposure to Harry Potter fandom, and the first book read to me as fandom critique for both YA dystopia and HP fandom in a way that I found absolutely hilarious and compelling. It seems (at least from my DW list) that people who read it in that way like it and find all the other themes compelling, and people who don't read it in that way are much less likely to like it (which is the majority of people I've seen).

If you look at the sff tag on my DW you'll see my writeups for Last Graduate (I can't link you directly because I've got spoilers) and Deadly Education (I realized I don't have spoilers for that one) -- if it makes it sound like something you'd like, then maybe you'd like it, but if not, yeah, you should probably skip.

Edited (I can spell) 2021-12-02 22:52 (UTC)

the first book read to me as fandom critique for both YA dystopia and HP fandom in a way that I found absolutely hilarious and compelling.

Oh that's so interesting! Wow, that makes so much sense about the different kinds of readers. And makes it sound much more intriguing to me than it did before. I might start it, then, and see how I feel.

Yeah, reading Deadly Education as sort of a genderbent H/D grimdark-AU fic definitely affected my reaction to it :) (And also meant it was easier to suspend my disbelief, too.) If that appeals to you it might be worth trying out just the first chapter or so to see if you get some of that vibe, though also fine if you don't, of course!

I am really glad I heard from you before giving it a try, because I do not think that reading it that way would have occured to me at all. But I'll at least read a chapter or two! Thanks!

...it just suddenly struck me, on reading your comment, that I ALSO don't like the way Novik tends to write H/D under her fandom identity either! So that's probably another level on which Scholomance doesn't work for me, lol, it's that I don't tend to like what Novik does with HP fic :P

ahahaha yeah this is pretty much how I thought you'd feel about it. Glad you liked it better than the first book, though!

Huh, I wonder if one of the reasons I was able to take it seriously is that I've... had a lot of practice. My sister used to feed me metric tons of YA dystopia because she was seriously into it, and they were very frequently quite nonsensical in this way, and they were also frequently... not great (but I'd try to make my way through them for my sister's sake... of course this was when I had fewer demands on my time than I do now, lol). (And then there was that year the Lodestone had all those YA dystopias, wasn't there one where all the 18-year-olds went to some goblin world and died, or something?) So I sort of feel that the nonsensical numbers are kind of making fun of YA dystopian numbers, and also it's kind of a relief to read something in the genre that also is well-written! But I can see why people who haven't had my previous rich experience with trying to connect YA dystopia aren't able to connect with it.

(But also I mostly skipped the monster-fighting bits.)

Yeah I do not have a lot of patience in general for YA dystopias, it's true! I don't love dystopias in general, but when I have liked them it's more often the ones written for adult or child audiences, not YA. The specific tropes of YA dystopia do not speak to me, and I have less patience for their failure modes than I do the failure modes of genres that I have more fondness for. (the specific tropes of modern YA in general these days might not speak to me actually......)

The monster fighting bits are SO uninteresting, and Novik does not have what it takes to write exciting battle scenes that are easy to follow, imo. I had this problem with the fight scenes in her Temeraire books too, I always got bogged down in them, and the books with the most fighting were the ones of least interest to me.

The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik

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