A Deadly Education

The Scholomance doesn't have teachers. It doesn't need to — the school itself is trying to kill its students, along with the maleficaria that stalk its halls, and the only reliable defense is graduating in a class alliance strong enough to survive the crawling horrors waiting at the exit. El Higgins has more raw destructive power than almost anyone in her year, an affinity for large-scale annihilation magic that marks her as a future dark sorceress no matter how hard she resists the pull, and exactly zero allies, because everyone assumes the worst about her.

Then Orion Lake, the school's inexplicably heroic golden boy, keeps saving her life whether she wants him to or not, and El has to figure out why — and what it means for her chances of surviving to graduation without becoming the monster everyone already expects.

Naomi Novik's Scholomance opener is a sharp, funny, and unsentimental take on the magic-school genre, narrated by a prickly, morally uncompromising heroine who refuses to be anyone's chosen one.