The Last Graduate (Scholomance, #2)

The Last Graduate
by Naomi Novik
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781529100891
Series: Scholomance #2
Publication Date: September 28, 2021
Pages: 388
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Del Ray Books

At the Scholomance, El, Orion, and the other students are faced with their final year--and the looming specter of graduation, a deadly ritual that leaves few students alive in its wake. El is determined that her chosen group will survive, but it is a prospect that is looking harder by the day as the savagery of the school ramps up. Until El realizes that sometimes winning the game means throwing out all the rules . . .

While the story remains a good one, the tendency to natter continues.  Randomly flipping to a page, there’s a few lines of dialog at the top of page 202, and then nothing but introspection and inner-dialog until page 208.  That’s a random page, so it’s not a rarity, and it happened at least once in the middle of not only a scene, but a conversation; by the time I got to the character’s response I had totally forgotten there was a ‘scene in play’ and I had to flip pages and pages back to figure out what the character was responding to.

I dinged the story itself 1/2 star from the first one because it’s meh.  Not quite as good as the first, although El’s attitude improved exponentially.  She also gets a mouse familiar who is loaded with sass, but neither is enough to pull the story up.

Though I’m damning with faint praise, the last one in the trilogy is out later this month and I’m willing to reserve it at the library to see how the story ends.  I’ll probably skip anything else by the author though.

I read this because it was sitting on my coffee table; it isn’t readily fitting any available squares on my Halloween Bingo card, so I’ll leave off shoe-horning it in somewhere unless I need it later (I might, for Country House Mystery and a Wild Card usage).