But for me, fandom is not a passive experience.

“I’ve been a Harry Potter fan at various points of my life, I’ve written fanfic for Harry Potter. “It’s influenced by Harry Potter fandom,” she told Polygon in a video chat ahead of The Last Graduate’s release. The Scholomance books were partly inspired by a pair of Eastern European legends about a school of magic where Satan claims the soul of the last graduate to leave.īut Novik doesn’t deny the Harry Potter connection, either. All her novels are compelling and immersive, and they all reimagine existing history and folklore in strikingly new ways. Like Novik’s Temeraire novels, which rewrite the Napoleonic Wars for a world with an entire field of aviation built around dragons, or her standalone novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which build on existing fairy tales, 2020’s A Deadly Education and the new sequel The Last Graduate are as much works of scholarship as works of fantasy. But the big emotions of high school are still present, as a protagonist who isn’t her school’s Chosen One - she knows that guy, and thinks he’s annoying - tries to navigate a lethal environment where kids frequently murder each other for power, if monsters don’t get them first. Its sheer viciousness, its grim humor, and its complicated interpersonal politics are an immediate draw. But Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, about kids at a preposterously deadly magical school, stands out in a ridiculously crowded field. At this point, so many books have been described as “Harry Potter, but for adults” that it’s easy to glaze over when the description comes up again.

The graduate novik