So, of course, he starts hanging out with her, to her utter consternation.Ī Deadly Education is one of those books that had me reading parts aloud and trying to explain to my husband (who happened to be sitting close by whenever I was reading) why it was so clever.

She makes it clear to Orion, however, that she isn’t one of those people who’s going to fall at his feet in fact, she has no interest in him whatsoever. And he just keeps going around saving people from mals, darn it, including El, and everyone else worships him. He has a slew of friends and plenty of support inside the school. Then she runs up against Orion Lake, who seems to be and have everything she’s not and doesn’t have: He not only belongs to the large and sought-after New York enclave his mother is in position to lead it in the future. She can only hope for the opportunity to show she has skills that would benefit an enclave so she can be invited into one after graduation.

El has no friends, is considered “negative” even by her mother’s fellow commune dwellers, and has reason to believe she’s destined to be a powerful practitioner of some dangerous magic. And El is the opposite of her mom, who’s a hippie-type free spirit who gives away her magical healing help to others for free and is beloved by anyone who meets her. She only has herself to rely on, after all: her mom is an independent practitioner of magic with no family to speak of, let alone an enclave of other wizards to protect and support her. That’s not to say the students are safe - they have to be constantly on the lookout for all kinds of mals every day, anywhere they go in the school, and be ready to use the skills they’re learning to fight them off - but the odds of survival are at least better.Įl is always on the alert, and she does everything she can to increase her store of mana so she has power to draw on to protect herself. Teens are “bursting with mana” they’re still learning to use and control, so they’re easy targets for the mals when out in the real world, so the Scholomance was built mostly in the void, barely connected to the world, with lots of protective spells and careful designs put into it so mals have a much harder time entering the school. Galadriel, or El, is at the end of her junior year at a school where she and several thousand other teens with magical abilities are sent for four years in part for training, but more with the objective of keeping them safer from “maleficaria,” creatures who prey exclusively on people with magic.

A deadly education book