Fantasy
📝 First Impressions
There are books that take a familiar idea and somehow make it feel fresh again.
A Deadly Education did that for me almost immediately.
On the surface, the premise sounds familiar enough: a school for magical children. I have always had a weakness for that kind of setting, so the Scholomance already had an advantage with me before I had even properly settled into the story.
But this is not the sort of magical school where students are mostly worried about homework, rival houses and whether they will get caught wandering the corridors after curfew.
The Scholomance is dangerous.
Properly dangerous.
The students are not simply there to learn how to use magic. They are trying to survive long enough to graduate.
And I loved that.
There was something wonderfully twisted about taking the idea of a magical school — something that usually comes with a certain amount of wonder, safety and belonging — and turning it into a place where survival itself becomes part of the education.
At the same time, what interested me most wasn’t only the danger or the magic.
Underneath all of that, A Deadly Education felt to me like a story about finding your place inside the community you belong to.
About learning how to exist among people who are, in some fundamental way, like you.
About deciding how much of yourself you are willing to reveal, how much you are prepared to change in order to fit in, and what happens when the parts of yourself you have tried to hide become exactly the parts everyone needs.
That idea stayed with me throughout the book.
I also liked that this wasn’t simply a story about discovering that you are special.
It was much more interesting than that.
It was about what you do once you already know you are different — and how you learn to live with that difference among other people who are different too.
And by the time I reached the end, I knew one thing very clearly:
I was not waiting for the Romanian translation of the second book.
I had read Educație Fatală in Romanian, but I wanted to know what happened next badly enough that I went and bought the next volume in English.
Patience, apparently, was not an option.
💜 What I Loved
The Scholomance itself was probably the first thing that completely won me over.
I have always liked stories about schools created specifically for children with magical abilities, but this one takes that familiar idea and makes it considerably more dangerous.
There is no comfortable sense that the adults have everything under control.
In fact, there are no adults there to protect anyone.
The students are effectively locked inside a school where almost everything seems capable of killing them, and education becomes inseparable from survival.
That changes the entire atmosphere.
Learning magic isn’t simply about becoming more skilled or passing exams. Every spell, every alliance and every piece of knowledge might eventually be the thing that keeps you alive.
I loved that tension.
The Scholomance feels less like a school you attend and more like an environment you have to learn how to survive.
And because of that, the relationships between the students become just as important as the magic.
Who do you trust?
Who can help you?
Who might need you later?
Who has access to resources you don’t have?
Who belongs to an enclave, and who is essentially trying to survive alone?
That was where the book became much more interesting to me than simply “another magical-school story.”
Because beneath all the monsters and spells, there is an entire social structure.
Everyone belongs to the same magical world, but that doesn’t mean everyone occupies the same place within it.
Some students arrive with protection, connections and an established community behind them.
Others have to find their own way into that community.
And that makes belonging incredibly complicated.
You don’t simply need friends.
You need alliances.
You need to understand how the group works.
You need to work out where you fit within it — and, perhaps more importantly, whether fitting in is worth the compromises it might require.
That theme of integration was one of the things I enjoyed most.
The characters are constantly evolving because the Scholomance gives them very little choice.
You either learn.
You adapt.
You understand the people around you.
Or you probably don’t make it very far.
I also really liked the girl who deliberately avoids using her magic because she wants the people around her to perceive her as normal.
There was something particularly satisfying about watching someone who had spent so much time suppressing that part of herself eventually become incredibly powerful when the situation genuinely demanded it.
She isn’t powerful because she spends the story trying to prove that she is.
Quite the opposite.
She has actively tried not to stand out.
And then, when people genuinely need her, all that hidden ability suddenly matters.
I loved that contrast.
There is something very satisfying about a character who doesn’t constantly advertise what she can do, but becomes one of the strongest people in the fight precisely when strength is actually necessary.
And that connects beautifully with the larger theme of the book for me.
You can spend a long time trying to make yourself smaller so that you fit comfortably into the world around you.
But eventually you may find yourself in a place where the very thing you were trying to hide is part of what makes you valuable to the community you belong to.
That is much more interesting to me than a straightforward “chosen one discovers their powers” story.
A Deadly Education is full of magic, monsters and danger, but what kept me invested was the way all of those things force the characters to discover who they are in relation to everyone else.
The school teaches magic.
But it also teaches them how to belong.
And sometimes those are two very different lessons.
🤔 What Didn’t Quite Work for Me
If there was one thing that occasionally worked against the book, it was simply how familiar the basic framework can feel.
A school for magical children is not exactly a new idea.
And no matter how different the Scholomance eventually becomes, it is almost impossible to enter a story like this without thinking, at least briefly, of Harry Potter and the enormous shadow it has cast over magical-school fiction.
The comparison is easy.
Children with magical abilities.
A school built specifically for them.
Lessons.
Friendships.
Rivalries.
A world with its own rules and hierarchies.
But thankfully, A Deadly Education doesn’t remain inside that comparison for very long.
The Scholomance is far more hostile, survival matters far more than school tradition, and the students’ relationships are shaped by necessity in ways that make this world feel very different.
Still, the familiarity is there.
At times I found myself recognising the bones of a story I already knew, even while Naomi Novik was doing something much darker and more complicated with them.
And I think that is probably the only real reservation I had.
The setting itself may start from a very familiar idea, but what the book does with belonging, community, power and survival is much more interesting than the premise initially suggests.
So yes, in the broadest possible sense, it is another magical-school story.
But it is a considerably more dangerous one.
And, for me, a much more interesting one than that description makes it sound.
👥 Who Would Enjoy This Book?
I think A Deadly Education is an obvious choice for anyone who has a weakness for magical schools but wants something darker and considerably less comfortable than the traditional version of that setting.
If the idea of children learning magic immediately makes you think of Harry Potter, there is certainly enough familiarity here to catch that particular part of your imagination.
But don’t expect Hogwarts.
The Scholomance is not somewhere you would secretly wish you could attend.
At least, I wouldn’t.
Probably.
The temptation of a magical library might still get me into trouble.
What makes the book particularly interesting, though, is that you don’t have to be fascinated by magical schools to enjoy it.
I would also recommend it to readers who like stories about outsiders trying to find their place in a community.
Because belonging here isn’t automatic.
Sharing magic doesn’t suddenly make everyone one big happy family. There are existing groups, expectations, advantages and relationships, and the characters have to navigate all of them while gradually figuring out where — and with whom — they belong.
That part of the story felt just as important to me as the fantasy.
It is also a good choice for readers who enjoy watching characters grow into themselves rather than simply discovering a new ability and instantly knowing what to do with it.
There is a real sense of evolution here.
People learn what they are capable of.
They reconsider what they thought they knew about themselves.
They discover that independence and isolation aren’t necessarily the same thing.
And they begin to understand that becoming part of a community doesn’t have to mean erasing the parts of yourself that make you different.
That was probably one of the aspects I connected with most.
So if you enjoy fantasy built around magic and danger but also want something underneath the spectacle — something about identity, belonging, relationships and finding your place among other people — A Deadly Education has much more to offer than its magical-school premise initially suggests.
And if, like me, you simply love the idea of a special school for magical children?
Well.
That certainly doesn’t hurt.
💭 Final Thoughts
What stayed with me most about A Deadly Education was not simply the magic.
It was the idea of finding your place among people who are, in one way or another, your own.
The Scholomance is obviously the spectacular part of the story. It is dangerous, strange and designed in a way that makes survival feel like part of the education itself.
But underneath all of that, I kept coming back to the same thing:
belonging.
The characters are not only learning how to use magic.
They are learning how to exist within a community.
How to trust.
How to cooperate.
How to stop seeing everyone around them only as competition.
How to decide who they want to become.
And I think that is what made the book work so well for me.
Because growing up is not only about becoming stronger or more capable.
Sometimes it is about understanding that independence does not have to mean isolation.
Sometimes it is about realising that being part of a group does not automatically mean losing yourself.
And sometimes it is about finally using the parts of yourself you once tried to hide.
That theme gave the book more weight than I expected from a magical-school story.
Yes, the comparison with Harry Potter is easy to make.
There is a school.
There are magical children.
There are lessons, rivalries and dangers.
But the Scholomance feels much less like a place of discovery and much more like a place of pressure.
Everything inside it forces the students to evolve.
And that evolution — not just the magic — is what I found most interesting.
Perhaps the clearest proof of how much I enjoyed the book came after I finished it.
I had read Educație Fatală in Romanian.
The sensible thing would have been to wait for the second volume to be translated.
I did not do the sensible thing.
I bought the next book in English.
I wanted to continue the story more than I wanted consistency on my bookshelf.
And, really, that probably says everything that needs to be said.
✨ The BookFairy Verdict
A Deadly Education
Fantasy
📖 Book Details
Title: A Deadly Education
Romanian Title: Educație fatală
Author: Naomi Novik
Series: The Scholomance
Series Position: Book 1 of 3
Genre: Fantasy
BookFairy Category: Fantasy
Romanian Publisher: Nemira
Collection / Imprint: Armada
Romanian Translator: Irina Ornea
Romanian Format: Paperback
Romanian Pages: 376
Romanian Publication Date: 17 September 2021
Romanian ISBN: 978-606-43-1218-1
🛒 Buy the Book
If A Deadly Education sounds like your kind of read, you can support BookFairy by purchasing the book through the links below. It won’t cost you anything extra, and using these links helps support the site while allowing me to continue creating honest, independent book reviews.
📚 Waterstones
📦 Amazon UK
📱 Kobo
