Book Review: The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
All shall love Galadriel Higgins and despair!
Del Rey Books, 2022, 409 pages
The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out - not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way.
But that impossible dream has somehow come true for El and her classmates. And what's more, she didn't even have to become the monstrous dark witch she's prophesised to become to make it happen. Instead of killing enclavers, she saved them, and now the world is safe for all wizards. Peace and harmony have enveloped all the enclaves of the world.
Just kidding.
Instead, someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in El's stead, and everyone she saved is at risk again with a full-scale enclave war on the horizon. And so, the first thing El needs to do after miraculously escaping the Scholomance, is to turn straight around and find a way back in.
The second book of the Scholomance trilogy ended with Galadriel Higgins, aka "El," wrecking the Scholomance and leaving it and her boyfriend, Orion Lake, behind. Obviously a YA trilogy can't end without a romantic resolution, so in The Golden Enclaves, El and her friends are steered by Plot Contrivances into a mission back to the Scholomance, where El fully expects to find Orion being consumed in everlasting torment inside the belly of a Maw-mouth, one of the most horrible of the Maleficaria that haunt this world.
However, that was really only the first big plot arc in The Golden Enclaves. El has destroyed the Scholomance, wiped out most of the Maleficaria population, and also started down the path prophesied by her grandmother of becoming a Dark Sorceress who will bring death and destruction to all the Enclaves in the world.
Actually, she's not Dark at all, and despite her anger management problems, we the readers have known from the start that El is not even a little bit evil, just really powerful and really bitchy, the latter not without reason. She had all the odds stacked against her in a world where the privileged children of Enclavers have all the odds stacked in their favor. But the world (for wizards) is such a crapsack one that even having all the odds stacked in your favor doesn't make your odds very good, so everyone is kind of in the same crappy boat.
The metaphor of a privileged elite living in comfort and (relative) safety at the expense of the less privileged was introduced in the first book by way of fairly standard wizard boarding school drama. In the second book, this metaphor became far more explicit as the author expanded on her worldbuilding to explain just exactly how the Enclave system and the Scholomance worked. And to her credit, she makes it complicated. It's not just a bunch of rich assholes enjoying their privilege and saying "suck it!" to everyone else. There are Reasons - both contrived magical ones and pragmatic real-world ones - why there aren't enough safe Enclave spaces to go around, why so many have to suffer, why parents have to send their children to a hellish place like the Scholomance just to give them a better chance of survival.
Which doesn't mean that the Enclavers aren't still a bunch of privileged assholes, and when El discovers the real secret behind how the Enclaves were built, her prophecy starts to sound more like just desserts than a pronouncement of doom.
And yet El, despite being a prophesied agent of destruction, actually still wants to save everyone, even the undeserving, and in The Golden Enclaves, she tries to find the means to do so.
El as a protagonist remains kind of annoying, as she's growing up a little but her power level is growing a lot faster than her maturity level. There are heartfelt talks with her mother and big reveals with her grandmother, multiple twists involving her love interest Orion, and one obligatory girl-on-girl scene that came out of nowhere and never matters again. El hooks up with an ice queen whose personality is no more pleasant than hers and who until now was merely an ally and barely a friend. But straight girls are so 2007 and El is only half-Indian, so the author probably needed to score some more diversity points, especially after Twitter blew up at her over some unfortunate descriptions in the first book.
Overall, however, this trilogy has improved with each book and I think The Golden Enclaves pretty nearly sticks the landing. While suffering from most of the drawbacks of YA fiction, it was still more nuanced and better-written than average. Naomi Novik put as much work into her magical society as she did into her magic system, with a lot less handwaving than most magical YA authors (*cough* Rowling). Having carefully laid the foundations, the horrible truth that emerges more or less makes sense. Moreover, as El keeps being confronted with hard choices, she also comes to understand the hard choices others had to make, and while that doesn't make their choices good, it also makes them less than purely evil. This is, again, a pretty good metaphor for the real world. There isn't an easy, lasting solution to hunger and poverty and homelessness and war, even if we'd like to imagine that with enough magic we could just make it go away. People are greedy and selfish and some are actually evil, and that makes the world worse, but a solution that requires a world without greedy, selfish, evil people is not a real solution.
So, if you want a slightly woke Harry Potter alternative, where the story wraps up tidily in three books, I can recommend The Scholomance as my surprise fav YA series of the year. The Golden Enclaves ends the story, but the world is still open enough that I suspect Novik might have more stories to write in it.
Also by Naomi Novik: My reviews of A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate.
My complete list of book reviews.
Del Rey Books, 2022, 409 pages
The one thing you never talk about while you're in the Scholomance is what you'll do when you get out - not even the richest enclaver would tempt fate that way.
But that impossible dream has somehow come true for El and her classmates. And what's more, she didn't even have to become the monstrous dark witch she's prophesised to become to make it happen. Instead of killing enclavers, she saved them, and now the world is safe for all wizards. Peace and harmony have enveloped all the enclaves of the world.
Just kidding.
Instead, someone else has picked up the project of destroying enclaves in El's stead, and everyone she saved is at risk again with a full-scale enclave war on the horizon. And so, the first thing El needs to do after miraculously escaping the Scholomance, is to turn straight around and find a way back in.
The second book of the Scholomance trilogy ended with Galadriel Higgins, aka "El," wrecking the Scholomance and leaving it and her boyfriend, Orion Lake, behind. Obviously a YA trilogy can't end without a romantic resolution, so in The Golden Enclaves, El and her friends are steered by Plot Contrivances into a mission back to the Scholomance, where El fully expects to find Orion being consumed in everlasting torment inside the belly of a Maw-mouth, one of the most horrible of the Maleficaria that haunt this world.
However, that was really only the first big plot arc in The Golden Enclaves. El has destroyed the Scholomance, wiped out most of the Maleficaria population, and also started down the path prophesied by her grandmother of becoming a Dark Sorceress who will bring death and destruction to all the Enclaves in the world.
Actually, she's not Dark at all, and despite her anger management problems, we the readers have known from the start that El is not even a little bit evil, just really powerful and really bitchy, the latter not without reason. She had all the odds stacked against her in a world where the privileged children of Enclavers have all the odds stacked in their favor. But the world (for wizards) is such a crapsack one that even having all the odds stacked in your favor doesn't make your odds very good, so everyone is kind of in the same crappy boat.
The metaphor of a privileged elite living in comfort and (relative) safety at the expense of the less privileged was introduced in the first book by way of fairly standard wizard boarding school drama. In the second book, this metaphor became far more explicit as the author expanded on her worldbuilding to explain just exactly how the Enclave system and the Scholomance worked. And to her credit, she makes it complicated. It's not just a bunch of rich assholes enjoying their privilege and saying "suck it!" to everyone else. There are Reasons - both contrived magical ones and pragmatic real-world ones - why there aren't enough safe Enclave spaces to go around, why so many have to suffer, why parents have to send their children to a hellish place like the Scholomance just to give them a better chance of survival.
Which doesn't mean that the Enclavers aren't still a bunch of privileged assholes, and when El discovers the real secret behind how the Enclaves were built, her prophecy starts to sound more like just desserts than a pronouncement of doom.
And yet El, despite being a prophesied agent of destruction, actually still wants to save everyone, even the undeserving, and in The Golden Enclaves, she tries to find the means to do so.
El as a protagonist remains kind of annoying, as she's growing up a little but her power level is growing a lot faster than her maturity level. There are heartfelt talks with her mother and big reveals with her grandmother, multiple twists involving her love interest Orion, and one obligatory girl-on-girl scene that came out of nowhere and never matters again. El hooks up with an ice queen whose personality is no more pleasant than hers and who until now was merely an ally and barely a friend. But straight girls are so 2007 and El is only half-Indian, so the author probably needed to score some more diversity points, especially after Twitter blew up at her over some unfortunate descriptions in the first book.
Overall, however, this trilogy has improved with each book and I think The Golden Enclaves pretty nearly sticks the landing. While suffering from most of the drawbacks of YA fiction, it was still more nuanced and better-written than average. Naomi Novik put as much work into her magical society as she did into her magic system, with a lot less handwaving than most magical YA authors (*cough* Rowling). Having carefully laid the foundations, the horrible truth that emerges more or less makes sense. Moreover, as El keeps being confronted with hard choices, she also comes to understand the hard choices others had to make, and while that doesn't make their choices good, it also makes them less than purely evil. This is, again, a pretty good metaphor for the real world. There isn't an easy, lasting solution to hunger and poverty and homelessness and war, even if we'd like to imagine that with enough magic we could just make it go away. People are greedy and selfish and some are actually evil, and that makes the world worse, but a solution that requires a world without greedy, selfish, evil people is not a real solution.
So, if you want a slightly woke Harry Potter alternative, where the story wraps up tidily in three books, I can recommend The Scholomance as my surprise fav YA series of the year. The Golden Enclaves ends the story, but the world is still open enough that I suspect Novik might have more stories to write in it.
Also by Naomi Novik: My reviews of A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate.
My complete list of book reviews.