… in the same way you know perfectly well you ought to stop reading and go to bed and you’ll feel hideously groggy in the morning if you don’t, and yet you keep going.

Wow.

Back when I first started A Deadly Education, all we really knew was El and the Scholomance. A magic school that seemed to be going whole hog into the ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ style of teaching. El managed to not only survive, but thrive. And in The Last Graduate, things seem to actually be going well. It all worked out. Everyone¹ is free, half the world’s monsters are dead, El has the book that will teach her how to set up perfect independent Golden Enclaves, and the Scholomance has claimed it’s last victims.

¹Except Orion. Stupid boy (not my words) refused to come out.

Also I hadn’t lost an ounce of the passionate desire to beat him over the head with a large stick, and surely that was a sign of true love.

And oh. There’s also some crazy dark malificer out there knocking down Enclaves left and right. The biggest monsters are coming for the wizards… and only El can deal with it.

In a lot of ways, that book did not go ways that I expected it to. It’s so much darker and terrible and yet at the same time more ‘human’ than I ever expected.

We’re all greedy, but children make it easier to be. We feel it’s only right to give them everything we can grab, even when you know that anything you feed your own child still comes out of someone else’s mouth.

El, on the other hand, is so done with all that after what she’s already been through. She’s going to save the world–and she is going to pay the price for it this time.

Because that’s what she does.

It’s a satisfying conclusion to one of the best new series I’ve read in a long time. I’m saddened that it’s over, but it ended well.

Onward!