[Review] A Deadly Education: Why Subversion Is Not Enough
nov 13 2023
This semester, I've been taking a Fantasy Literature class, one that I've been trying to get into for several semesters now— it's a popular class, and previously it's either already full or being held at a time that doesn't work with my schedule. I'm a big fantasy fan and it's the genre I mostly read, so getting to read and write about fantasy novels for class sounded like a dream come true. We've read a wide range of books in the class, ranging from urban low fantasy to the highest of elf drenched high fantasy. There have been books that I've liked (The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison), books that I've thought were okay (Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia), and books that I thought were objectively well written, but weren't for me (The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell). A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is the first book we've read that I both haven't liked, and have thought was objectively pretty bad.
Naomi Novik is most well known for her fairytale retelling books Spinning Silver and Uprooted... and for founding Archive of Our Own, which is now the biggest fanfiction archive in the world. Better known as Astolat on Ao3, Novik wrote slash fic for a variety of fandoms, including Harry Potter and BBC Merlin. I'm a chronically online person, and while I read Harry Potter when I was very young and didn't know fanfic existed, I watched BBC Merlin around... 2020? So even prior to this class, I knew Novik as Astolat and was passingly familiar with her name and work. When I realized I would be reading one of her published novels for class, I went and read some more of her fanfiction to get a sneak peek, so to speak. It's been a while at this point, but I remember being pretty impressed with her writing style and her ability to form characters.
Which is why I was so disappointed when I opened A Deadly Education and immediately realized I was not going to like this book.
Here is the opening passage of A Deadly Education:
"I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life. I hadn't really cared much about him before then one way or another, but I had limits. It would've been all right if he'd saved my life some really extraordinary number of times, ten or thirteen or so— thirteen is a number with distinction. Orion Lake, my personal bodyguard; I could live with that. But we'd been in the Scholomance almost three years by then, and he hadn't shown any previous inclination to single me out for special treatment." (Novik 3)
Oh noooooooo, I thought with dread. This is very much not my style of writing. It feels very young, very "chatty," more focused on having quippy, quotable lines than telling a meaningful story. While Novik can obviously string a sentence together, the content doesn't have much weight to it. And beginning this book with a passage about how much our narrator hates another character for saving her life... my heterosexual alarm bells were tingling. I could tell right away that the narrator was going to end up with this man romantically.
But I hadn't lost all hope yet. This was the beginning of the novel— of course it was very "talky." Novik had to exposit a bit about the world. And of course the narrator sounds young, she's in high school. She's meant to be annoying... right? It would get better!
As the novel went on, I slowly came to the realization that it wasn't going to get better. In fact, it was getting worse. El (the narrator) and her voice became more and more grating as the book went on. The plot never kicked in and the story failed to build tension, instead following a very fanfic-y plot structure of "El goes to class, explains another aspect of her world to the reader, some kind of event happens, it's solved quickly, everything goes back to normal, repeat." This made it hard to get invested in the story, especially when El is seemingly capable of killing monsters that nobody else in the world can kill, with barely a scratch left on her. What could possibly hurt her, then? What could possibly pose a threat to her and this world?
The plot only really gets going in the very last chapter of the novel, where a problem and its solution arise out of nowhere, there's a big battle and El receives a mysterious letter from her mother telling her not to trust Orion, who is now her boyfriend (?) after disappearing intermittently throughout the middle of the novel. Don't worry, I'll get to their relationship (and the relationships in this novel in general) in a minute. Some may say that sure, the book isn't plot heavy— it's not supposed to be. It's character driven instead. But I don't think it's very character driven, either!
There is constantly a wall between El and the reader, making it hard to actually become invested in her journey— a wall that El/Novik puts there on purpose. The style of the book is that El is talking directly to some unseen, unspecified audience who isn't familiar at all with the Scholomance and its inner workings. This gives Novik an opportunity to have El infodump about the world, giving readers insight into both how the world works as well as El's views and opinions on things. And this is a fine method of worldbuilding to implement, if you frame it properly as part of the narrative.
For example, it's implied that the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is writing some kind of book about the way clones like her are treated, based on the way she talks to the audience and comments on some of the events throughout her life. Ishiguro doesn't tell us who she's actually writing to, or how she plans to get it published, because he doesn't really need to. It's merely a framing device that works as a way to have the narrator explain things in their own life to an audience, and still have it feel authentic and real. It's brought up early enough and is obvious enough that it makes sense right away and keeps the explanations from feeling too phony. Novik doesn't begin with this framing device, which leaves me wondering... why is El talking like this? Why is she narrating her own life with such a strong inner monologue, explaining things to herself that she already knows? This creates such a strong barrier between El and the reader, because she treats us like silent observers without being able to actually straight up address us— because El doesn't actually have a reason to address an audience, so that would be breaking the fourth wall.
There is one moment, just one in the entire novel, where El actually breaks the fourth wall:
"Reader, I ran the fuck away." (Novik 294)
The one and only moment where El actually acknowledges that she is telling a story to an unseen audience is used as a quippy one liner to brush off any emotional impact from the events that take place prior to this line. Not only that, it's also two hundred and ninety pages into a three hundred page novel, making it feel more like an afterthought than a framing device.
So instead the book relies on El telling us what she feels. This is the biggest problem the novel has— its reliance on telling, not showing. Novik tells us El's feelings, tells us that she hates this character or likes that character, instead of naturally seeing their interactions and realizing this for ourselves. She tells us how classes and lunchtime and other school activities work, instead of showing us scenes where El is in class and letting us slowly piece together how the school actually functions. El simply tells us her tragic backstory, and other characters simply tell El their or other character's tragic backstories, instead of Novik weaving these stories into their behavior or using these conversations to gradually show her characters trusting each other more.
I feel like a silent outsider watching El's life from afar, or like El is the campus tour guide dumping information to a sea of blank faces. This distance is compounded with the side characters, because El isn't really that close to them. We only see her faraway perspective of the other characters, which is then filtered again through the odd framing of this narrative. The distance also makes it hard to get involved in any of the relationships between the characters, because they just feel so far away and flat. The most well fleshed out relationship is the one between El and her trading-partner-turned-ally-and-reluctant-friend Aadhya, and even then it feels like we don't really know anything about Aadhya and why she continues to reach out to El after being shot down time and time again.
By far the worst relationship in the book is the one between El and Orion, which is bad, considering this is the relationship the book shoves in your face and clearly wants you to be invested in. First of all, I do want to say that I always find it a bit annoying when authors are well known fanfic authors, and all their fanfic is gay romance... but all their published works are straight romances. Maybe this doesn't bother anyone else, and I'm not trying to police what people can and can't write and publish, but it makes it feel like we're not "good" enough for "real" literature, aka published literature (which is an obviously untrue and outdated way of looking at literature in general, operating off a lot of assumptions).
I'm not saying that Novik maliciously hates gay people and doesn't think they're good enough for her published work, because that would be one hell of an assumption. I just see this as part of a trend where desptite the majority of fanfic in general being about gay male relationships, when those authors break into the publishing industry with original work, it's usually with straight relationships. This usually comes in two flavors: fanfic with the names changed- think After (Anna Todd), which is Harry Styles self-insert fic or The Love Hypothesis (Ali Hazelwood), which is famously Reylo fanfic- or fanfic writers who entered the publishing industry with original work- think Cassandra Clare who wrote Harry Potter fic ( (which author Holly Black of The Cruel Prince beta read) before breaking into the mainstream with her Mortal Instruments series. It's worth considering that Novik in particular has written a lot of Drarry fanfic in the past, which is eerily similar to the dynamic El and Orion have in this novel.
That aside, the Orion/El relationship still just doesn't do it for me. From the beginning, El is nothing but mean to Orion, mostly for how entitled he is without realizing it. Orion, at first, thinks El is evil, but quickly comes to understand she's just misunderstood and continues to hang out with her. Everyone else assumes they're dating, and El uses this to her advantage, enjoying the perks that come from "dating" the strongest and most popular boy in school. Not really the dynamic I typically enjoy, but a fine start to two character's relatioship, and I was interested to see where it would go from there.
But it doesn't go anywhere from there— it doesn't evolve. They stay in this exact dynamic until the end of the novel, with El becoming only marginally "nicer" to Orion as she "gets to know him" more. The thing is, she doesn't get to know him from spending time with him and talking to him— she just learns his tragic backstory from another character, Chloe, and decides that he's actually a pretty good person after all! In fact, El and Orion barely spend any time together for the majority of the book, only interacting in any significant way at the very beginning and very end of the novel.
Most of El's time is spent doing homework and forging alliances, yet the book wants us to be invested in her and Orion's "will they or won't they," even though they so obviously will... because the author has demanded it, not because they genuinely make sense as a pair or seem to really like each other. The end of the book tries to have a "feminist twist" where the two leads deconstruct the idea that women simply hate to hate whoever's interested in them, with it being made obvious that El doesn't owe Orion a relationship simply because he's interested in her (and tries to make Orion seem like a good feminist boy for being aware of this). But this falls flat because it's clear that El actually does have romantic feelings for him, so they are falling into the trope of the male and female lead simply getting together because that's what male and female leads do! Honestly, Aadhya and El spend much more time together and have a relationship that actually develops over the course of the novel, which makes them a lot more interesting to read about than Orion and El.
Orion is mainly acts as a narrative device here, on multiple levels. One one hand, he's used by El (and, by extension, Novik) to explain class divide in this world (which is a metaphor for class divide in our world) to the audience. Orion is from an enclave, which is a well established group of magical families. Children from enclaves have a bunch of hidden privileges, like being able to share power with each other, get out of having to do undesirable school jobs like maintenance, and generally just have access to more resources than non-enclave kids. Orion is so used to these benefits that he just doesn't consider the fact that some people don't have access to them, and might find it harder to survive in the Scholomance because of their lack of resources. But this idea isn't used in a subtle or interesting way, and we don't really see Orion learn this on his own and begin grappling with what his privilege means. Instead, El just gives him a crash course in why being rich makes your life easier and he immediately accepts it and feels bad. Then he continues to act the way he always does.
On the other hand, Orion acts as a deconstruction/subversion of the Chosen One, a common fantasy trope. The Scholomance is a book about magic school, and Orion is our Harry Potter. Novik is interested in what being "the chosen one" would do to someone psychologically, especially a young person, and what a fantasy novel told from the perspective of a non "chosen one" would look like. Again, this is an interesting concept, but Novik executes it poorly. We just don't see Orion enough to actually feel the pressure that he's under, and notice that despite being "popular," he's actually extremely isolated because of his heroism. Like always, we're simply told about the way his destiny has impacted him from a young age by an irrelevant side character (thank you for your service on the Infodump Front Lines, Chloe).
This article by Sarah Skwire sheds a little bit of light on why this book relies so heavily on worldbuilding exposition and sloppy analogies for social issues even though they don't really work. Novik wrote the Scholomance out of frustration with the worldbuilding in Harry Potter, saying that she found it "extremely irritating." Like with most YA/children's novels, the worldbuilding in Harry Potter falls apart the moment an adult thinks about it for more than five seconds. Novik set out to subvert the genre conventions that Harry Potter foisted upon fantasy (and more specifically, the "wizarding school" subgenre of fantasy) and make them a bit more logical and real.
And I applaud this motivation, really. Although Harry Potter began as a series for children, it aged alongside its audience (and its main characters). Each book is for a slightly older demographic, and the last book does feel like it's for a significantly older audience than the first book. And to this day, plenty of adults continue to love and read Harry Potter because of the nostalgic attachment they have to the series. But despite most of the books being aimed at and consumed by an adult audience, it handles its politics and social issues dismally. This isn't an essay meant to break down everything wrong or "problematic" with Harry Potter, so go somewhere else if you're looking for that. I will simply point to the antisemitic goblin banker caricatures, the fact that slavery is legal in the wizarding world and everyone acts like Hermione is the weird one for trying to stop it, werewolves being a metaphor for the AIDS crisis (but are also all child predators), and the epilogue that feels like it's taken out of Ronald Reagan's wet dreams as just a flyby nod to some of the poorly handled social issues in Harry Potter.
I'm not the first person to notice these issues and I won't be the last. Subversion of J.K. Rowling's whimsical wizard school is a genre in and of itself nowadays, with plenty of people seeking to break down her fantastical world and do it in a way that's better, grittier, more real, and to write a Hogwarts that is more diverse, more well thought out, more interesting than the one in the Harry Potter books. And again, I think this is a great thing!
The problem is that subversion on its own is not enough. It's what the author does with that subversion, what they're trying to say with it. Novik includes some interesting themes about class and capitalism and the education system, but they're all drowned out by pages upon pages of infodumps that feel, to me, like Novik combing through the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to find individual things that don't make sense and tweaking or "fixing" them as she encounters them. The themes get lost under the information overload. Here is my gritty evil magic school and here is how it works— it's a presentation, not a showcase.
Some of the writing style can be chalked up to the intended audience. This book is firmly YA and feels directed towards a younger YA audience, which is honestly a nice change from the multitude of "YA" fantasy novels that skew for a much older demographic. A Deadly Education might be the first thing some teens read after Harry Potter— Baby's First Magic School Subversion. And it might be the first time teens encounter a novel that tackles- or at least attempts to tackle- topics like the inherent unfairness of capitalism and class struggle. If you've never encountered these topics before, this could really pique your interest and seem like the most revolutionary thing you've ever read— and the chatty, sarcastic, tell-don't-show writing style might not bother you as much.
But this style and method of writing technically having a very small intended audience doesn't negate the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a sloppy and lazy way to achieve Novik's goals. If you're a thirteen year old and this is your first time encountering class issues in a fantasy novel, you're not going to walk away with a very well explained or nuanced understanding of class issues. Even as a teenager, I don't think I would have liked this book. I would have hated the dull romance between El and Orion, and the oddly low stakes, the meandering plot. And as an adult, I sure as hell don't like this novel! Overall, I found it boring and unmemorable, and doing some mildly interesting things with its worldbuilding that were ultimately ruined by over-explanation.
When this book first came out, there was also a firestorm of critique about the way it handled diversity and its ensemble cast of characters of color. Some of these critiques are fair and well reasoned, but it feels like a lot of them are just nitpicking at and purposefully misinterpreting minor, unimportant details to have a "valid reason" to hate on this novel. I'm not even saying this to defend Novik or this novel (as we've already established that I don't like it), but can we just stop pretending like the only reason it's okay to hate a book is if it's "problematic?" Yes, a book being racist or sexist or homophobic is a completely fair reason to hate it. But you can also dislike a perfectly inoffensive book simply for its prose or characters.
As someone who really did not like this novel, I didn't find it to be super offensive (although I'm obviously not the Ultimately Authority on what is and isn't offensive when it comes to minority ethnic groups). There were only two writing choices that made me raise my eyebrows and cringe. First of all, I do think it's kind of an odd writing choice to have El's Indian side of the family want to kill her and to have her mother literally be her white savior who has to abscond in the middle of the night to save her life... but maybe I'm just being uncharitable here. I would love to know what other people, specifically Indian people, thought about this aspect of El's backstory.
Something that had me rolling my eyes at first was the Chinese character being called Liu, which I'm aware is most commonly used as a last name. But after reading some comments by Chinese speaking readers about the difficulty in romanizing Chinese characters, especially when it comes to names, I will retract this complaint, because it seems like Novik did genuinely do her due diligence here and that the name is technically "correct." I do find it odd that she chose a name that most readers would clock as a common Chinese last name instead of just choosing literally any other Chinese name, but maybe I'm reaching.
But by far the most egregious and indefensible example of racism in A Deadly Education was Novik painting Black protective hairstyles like locs as dirty, inventing a kind of monster that lays eggs in locs as a justification for this:
Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches, which you can probably imagine, but in case you need help, the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don't manage to get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you've got a window of a few days after that before you stop being able to move. On the bright side, something else usually finishes you off quickly at that point." (Novik 186)
Horrible run-on sentences aside, this is just a really bad "worldbuilding" tidbit that plays on a history of racial stereotyping that Black hair is dirty. Yes, it makes sense within the dangerous world Novik has created, but why is it only Black hairstyles that are being singled out? Why doesn't El mention French braids being equally dangerous?
Novik did apologize for this passage, both for playing into a racist stereotype and for incorrectly referring to locs as "dreadlocks." She explains that this passage was added to the novel late in the editing process, after reviewers and sensitivity readers (!!) got their review copies, and that it would be taken out in future printings. It's genuinely baffling to me that she would ever add in something about Black hairstyles at the last moment, knowing it won't be checked over by a sensitivity read, especially knowing that it's a tidbit that portrays Black hairstyles in a negative manner. Like, if you're going to go to the effort to get sensitivity readers in the first place, why just act like you don't actually need them? Anyways, she does say in the apology that in the future, she'll make sure all of her books get a final sensitivity read before they're published, so do with this apology what you will.
I don't think Novik is a bad person, or even a bad writer. I didn't like A Deadly Education, but I've long since grown out of YA, and I've heard good things about Spinning Silver and Uprooted. Her published works aside, I do genuinely think her fanfic is well written. A Deadly Education's problems come down to the simple fact that it's not really a story, it's a subversion: Novik wants to paint a broad picture, rather than tell a specific story, which is... what she accomplished. These problems are not insurmountable, and can easily be improved on in the rest of the series. But I'm simply not interested in Novik's cynical subversion, so I won't be continuing on with the Scholomance.
For anyone else who is interested in non-Harry-Potter magic school, I highly recommend the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I think the later books in that series do a much better job at subversion and discussing the problems inherent in our education systems. Le Guin spends so much time building up the characters and the world naturally that it works much better to make the reader think about her world and the way it mirrors our own.