It’s been a while since it came out, but I remember at the time there being some kerfuffle about A Deadly Education, and then… entirely forgot what the kerfuffle was about. Which meant I never got round to seeking it out to read, without ever really thinking about why. Until someone lent it to me, as an easy read and I figured, why not, at least I’d know now.

It was surprisingly interesting, not least because the book is very much an easy beach read, for the most part, and they don’t tend to be interesting at all.

Having now read it, and asked someone else who remembered, the kerfuffle as I understand it comes down to the way the book… reduces people down to the languages they speak, for the most part, and commodifies that aspect of their personality and culture, while ignoring basically everything else about them. There is a book-internal logic for this, so it’s not completely out there, but it is a little jarring to read, and is potentially only saved ever so slightly by the fact it comes across as pretty much universal. It’s not… good. But it’s not as bad as my memory of the twitter drama at the time suggested it might be. Which I suppose is unsurprising, given twitter.

For me, far more jarring in any given moment was the fact that Novik… has a mixed grasp of Britishisms. A Deadly Education follows a girl at a magic school… but not just any magic school. Nope, it’s a ludicrously dangerous, health and safety nightmare of a Hogwarts on steroids. You think Dumbledore would make an ofsted inspector weep? This place would have them fainting in the halls. She’s alone and without allies, and needs to find a way to survive the school and get out to be a wizard in her own right… but even her own powers are against her. Dun dun duuuh etc. etc., you know the drill. But the school was supposedly founded by a Brit and has a disproportionate British contingent, due to this heritage. The protagonist herself is from Wales. So why on earth are we dealing with sophomores and shop class and boxes of milk in the cafeteria?

It would annoy me, but if Novik had stuck entirely American, I think I could have tuned it out, but she wobbles in between semi-accurate British stuff (calling someone a “twat”, for instance, and talking about Welsh rugby culture) and then pure Americana (the description of the cafeteria was only familiar to me as school I see in American visual media; it bore no resemblance to any experience I have of the UK school system… where it would be a canteen, for a start). And the wobbling means you’re never quite sure which way it’s going to go. The protagonist’s voice never felt that authentic to me, in a large part because of this, and it took a long time for me to stop being knocked out of the prose every time something came up.

It also didn’t help that the protagonist spends most of the first third of the novel almost entirely on grumbling, without… a huge amount of plot actually happening… so it’s very easy to get knocked out of the prose as I’m rolling my eyes at her anyway. It’s not that the grumbling is unwarranted – it’s really not, her life as portrayed in the book enormously sucks and anyone would be very right to be annoyed and upset about it – but there’s a Lot of it, and after a while… that’s just not enjoyable reading. It gets samey. And when she’s not grumbling, it’s laying on the exposition really quite thick, or doing both at the same time… which again… like, exposition is necessary. I need to understand some of the world I’m reading about* to get to grips with what’s going on. But I’m not, primarily, reading books for the world building, so much as for the story and characters, and for me, over-egging the world building at the expensive of having a plot happen or people doing people things just… gets dull. If I wanted that, RPG manuals exist. Or Dune. So this, combined with a character whose primary trait appears to be “aggrieved” and… eh.

From which you might think I hated the book, 1 star, do not read. You certainly wouldn’t think I’d have already pre-ordered the sequel which comes out in September. And yet.

About… half way in, the book changes a lot. Things… actually start happening. Characters have actual character. El, our protagonist, interacts with more than one of them, and on more than a superficial level. There are problems to be solved. Dramatic stakes are at stake. It gets fun. It gets exciting. It turned into a really compelling page turner, where there are several characters I like and want to know more about, the protagonist becomes only reasonable levels of grumpy, and the book is actually about… stuff. Not just a self-referential manual on the world Novik has created. And when it does make that switch, we’re back into the page-turning plotting that Novik is really good at, and all that overkill on the world-building pays off, because you’re really immersed in this stupid, ridiculous world. Everything that wasn’t working at all pulls together and becomes legitimately great, in a bizarre alchemy over the course of about 50 pages.

By the end, I was hooked. I want to know what happens next. I’m invested in the characters and the world. I care. But if you’d asked me at 50 pages… I would never have seen it coming.

I suspect some of this is because the book is trying to be two things at once, and the switchover is the point at which it changes which is the dominant force on the narrative. At the start, it feels like a heavy handed critique of the magical school genre (which isn’t unwarranted, but isn’t necessarily a fun read, imo), where the bit where it’s being an actual novel that people might enjoy reading is somewhat on the backburner. It’s much like the very early Pratchett books** (while being… entirely unlike them), in that it’s more concerned with making its humorous-ish point than being its own self, and it only really comes into its own (like Discworld) once it’s done that groundwork and decided to just be its own thing and put the commentary/jokes in the background. I think both of them benefit from having done that early work of “lol, I am satirising <thing you all know about>”, but I suspect I’m very unlikely to read The Colour of Magic again, because well, it’s done its job for me now. Discworld has been kickstarted into existence, and that referential satire was a catalyst for the creation of something interesting in its own right… but wasn’t super fun outside of that. A Deadly Education does at least cram all of that down into half of one book, leaving the second half to just be a fun narrative set in the world it did all that work on… but that mismatch is really weird to read through.

It’s lucky the latter half is really quite good enough to make up for it. I cannot emphasise enough how sucked in and invested I was by the end. There’s a twist. There’s a hanging plot thread I need an answer to. There’s an emotional arc that really needs a resolution. It’s all there. But I can’t really use that to excuse how not invested I was at the start. It’s tricky.

If I could separate it out, it’d be a 2 star start and a 4 star ending… so it gets 3 stars to average it out, but it’s a “mixed” 3 stars, and definitely not a “meh”. For me, the ending really is worth it, and there’s 50% of a really, genuinely good fun book in there. But ymmv quite a bit on how worthwhile getting through the first half is to get there.

*Ok that’s not true, some of my favourite books go “exposition? never heard of her” and drop you right in, but never mind. For the ones where you’re expected to understand what’s going on at all.
**I’ve spoken to three different people about this book, and I think this point came up in one of those three conversations, but I can’t remember if one of them or I made it. Whoever it was, it was a good point, and it’s stuck with me, so here it is. Sorry guys.