I have to say, when I read the premise of this deadly school where students are constantly at risk of death, I thought it was a bit much, but I really like Uprooted and enjoyed Spinning Silver, so I gave the book a try.

It turns out there are very justifiable reasons for why students are constantly at risk. Spoiler: teenage wizards are like fish in a barrel for monsters, or “mal”s, but they’re still better off in the school than out of it. The school itself still seems to be unusally malevolent in addition to the mals, but if the school (and magic itself) is based in belief, it makes sense that a cynical character like El who believes everyone and everything is out to get her actually has a lot of stuff out to get her.

El’s spiky personality is not for everyone, but I liked it. I have a soft spot for prickly characters, like the Dragon in Uprooted. It’s entertaining to read the constant stream of belittling insults when you know it’s all bark and no bite. As much as I love Uprooted, the power dynamic between an older male mentor who is verbally abusive and a young female is a bit problematic—not wrong itself, but reminiscent of all the ways similar relationships could fo wrong. I thought it was refreshing to take that dynamic and turn it on it’s head and have the female half of a couple be the prickly methodical one and the male half be the ditzy prodigy.

This book is a great allegorical critique of capitalism and I feel called out by it. I’m of two minds. I feel that El’s mom could have compromised her morals a bit for the well-being of her child, but at the same time I admire her and El’s decision to withdraw from participating in enclaves. It’s not very realistic (we can’t all live in yurts in communes and not charge anything for services and be spirit-whole), but capitalism is built on inequality and oftentimes we’re too busy trying to get a little bit ahead to stop and think “actually the whole system is fucked.”

As a teacher, I can appreciate the digs at education as well (lectures which often don’t count for much except for a few things worth an ordinate amount on quizzes). There’s definitely some great satire in that.

Also, as an Asian woman, I liked how the protagonist was half-Asian and how she allied with two other Asian women. Yes, Orion is White (which fits with his obliviousness to the privilege he holds), but of the 4 main characters, over half are Asian! There’s also a lot of female representation as a whole, with Orion’s mother, rather than his father, being the important Magister and the valedictorian being female. It makes sense that El, as a female, tends to gravitate towards other females and that girls would have a stronger connection to their mothers (and in Liu’s case, grandmother) than their fathers.

Of course, I know there’s criticisms (one famous one in particular that I will address in a separate post) of the way race and language are depicted in the book. Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, so here’s mine: while Naomi Novik, as a white woman, does write some microagressions into the book, it’s not blatantly racist—definitely not to the point of cancelling it. People can read or not read what they want, especially for fun, but as an ethnically Chinese person who thinks about ethnic identity and racism and representation a lot, I was not offended by it. It probably helped a lot that I actually liked the book. There’s hardly anything under the sun that’s not problematic in some way, after all. We are more likely to excuse problems if there are merits too. Overall, this book may have tried too hard to have token representation, but I do feel that El, Aadhya, and Liu are well-developed characters of color.