Hey, hi, hello. Welcome and welcome back to my channel. My name is Jess and today I want to talk about A Deadly Education. Will this be
the first book review on my Booktube channel..? Maybe but first and foremost: VOTE! We are getting down to the wire people so make sure you vote. So first I want to say that I am not good at
reviewing books, I have mentioned this previously, um that I really respect people who can
write really eloquent, beautifully worded reviews or even do them in videos; that is not
me. So just fair warning this is going to be all over the place and so you've been warned. I'm gonna keep this spoiler free for the most part and then at the end maybe a little bit of spoilery but
i'll definitely mark it on [the screen] and put a time stamp in the description. So A Deadly Education is written by Naomi Novik. This came out maybe two weeks ago and it's been on a lot of people's most
anticipated lists for this year because it is a new book set in a magic school and with everything that's happened with Joanne Rowling, everyone is excited to have a new book at a magic school
that maybe they can replace Harry Potter with. um but I at first thought
it was a young adult because 'magic school' and it sounded like you know like 18 and under and then I saw that it was being sold as adult from the imprint which is Del Rey
books, I believe and the price point um it's $28. Well it's $28, when I looked at Bookshop.org
it's $25, so it definitely adult priced um and then when I saw it like a physical copy,
it's very short it's like 350 pages max. But anyway, the only thing I knew about it going
in was it was set at a magic school, apparently that you either graduate or you die and I was
like that sounds very interesting. I didn't look any further into it then it came out, there
was some controversy which I talked about in my previous or the last week's Book CommuniTEA video, where people um were highlighting some passages that they found racist. So I had already wanted to read it, I had it in from the library and so I read it, I finished yesterday? I finished yesterday.
So A Deadly Education, what did I think of it ? What did Drake say? I'm UPSET. I am upset, uh one the book is beautiful oh and I was like I really hope I love this book because it's like black and
gold, the UK edition is like a navy blue, oh my gosh. I wanted to buy both editions and now I'm like: can I really justify that, especially at an adult price when I didn't love this book? So the whole concept of this world is that there are wizards and there's mundanes- so people who don't have magic and the wizards go to this school the Scholamance and I think it's from like 14 to 18, so you know
like 9th grade to senior year to learn magic, learn spells, in order to get out into the world and
then either they live on their own or they join an enclave, which is like a group of wizards living together. The thing about the school though is it's "deadly", there are no teachers, no professors,
no one really besides the students and monsters, there's hella monsters everywhere. Always trying to kill you, always trying to eat you and so you always have to be on your guard and the that's it, like you hear that description of the book and then I was, you think there's
going to be some other plot and there's not. That was a big issue with this book for me, there
really is no plot to the last 20% of the book. It is very much an info dump, like it felt as if- I
watched like two other reviews for this book and it someone described it as an Ikea instruction
manual for this book or like her outline but she just wrote it and I agree with both of those
things because it was so much info dumping and i'm not even going to say world building because
I love world building but just dumping information, just typing that up, is different from world
building in my opinion. And there's so much of it and I only think this is going to be a duology,
so I think she did herself a disservice because she's like i'm going to tell you everything about
the world in this first book then a little bit of story and then i'll have a second book. So it's
already limited there, page count she limited herself and it didn't feel like a story, it felt as
if she was writing- you know when series come out and then sometimes they come up with a companion book or like a book that talks about the world? For instance, with the Game of Thrones, the Song of Ice and Fire series there's uh The World of Ice and Fire, this big book that just goes into
history about the families and the fights and all this stuff, which if you love the series is perfect
because you get all this extra information. That's what the majority of this felt like, like you want
a deeper explanation of everything because this this just wasn't it. Our main character is El, her
full name is Galadriel but she goes by El and she's the worst. No one likes her and it's not
really explained why no one likes her, aside from her just being a bitch to everybody but she
says like where her and her mom live, no one likes her and then she goes to school and no one likes her and it's like why? Her mom is this powerful wizard but she chooses to live on her own in like
this hippie commune and like you know not be with an enclave and then there's El. So in this story
everyone, all wizards have a different affinity. So one person might have affinity for
weather magic or they may have an affinity for transfiguration spells. El has an affinity for
mass destruction, which sounds cool but it's also it's very limiting in this story and then
the other main character is it Orion or Orion i'm not sure, has an affinity for like
battle magic or battle spells. So he does really well against all the monsters in the school. Another thing, the monsters are called mals like maleficaria? Is that it? Look, while this book was
short it also, I was just, I still feel confused. All the info dump and sometimes I still feel confused . So those are, the main two characters. They're in their junior year at the Scholomance and like
I said no one likes El but it's still really not well explained besides that she's just a bitch because she assumes no one likes her, so then no one does like her because she's standoffish and she stays to herself, she's a loner but then the first line of this book, so the first line of this
book is: I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life." Very interesting start but whatever. So he like I said has affinity for battle magic so he's always saving people
from male that they weren't paying attention to, that came up behind them always saving people and then there's El. So she and her magic, she always has to be careful because since she has
an affinity for mass destruction she can easily turn a simple spell into something that you know wipes out half of the class, so all sounds very interesting right? I did like the description of
like the school, it's kind of like, I picture it as cylindrical? circular? Because there's like the
core where all of like the classrooms and stuff are, cafeteria and then there's like the outside
surrounding it are the dorms and they rotate. So every year, it rotates a bit down so you're a
freshman you're going to start on like the top and then it's going to rotate down and the seniors are going to be on the bottom, sounds cool, so you know staircases may change and things can pop out of wherever because to get out of the school once you're a senior, after the this school year is over,
you go out through this room but the room is full of these monsters, these mals, and you basically have to get through it, it's like a gauntlet if you get through you graduate but i still don't
really get why they created this school. And while it sounded cool in theory, this school just sounds awful. Like the story lacked so much because the teachers were missing. Like, I love those teacher
relationships, even when like the student hates them or they have this really great mentorship,
that was missing and so I didn't even feel a connection to like the magic or the spells either
because they're basically just teaching themselves. Also the everything about this book is like oh
"dark academia" it's "deadly", this school so scary but that she tells you so many times that it's
not even, it doesn't even feel like creepy or dark. It's just like okay we fucking get it,
there's monsters. Like it's a very tell not show book. It was very much like let me tell
you how deadly the school is, let me tell you, did I mention there's monsters, did I tell you
there's monsters, did I mention you might die? Okay, Naomi we fucking get it. There would be
moments of like okay finally action is happening, here's this big monster they're in this bind, how
are they gonna get out of it and then El, there was so much inner dialogue or like monologue
because she doesn't talk to that many people and it will pause and she might be trying to
fight this big monster and then in her head she's gonna go and give you three pages of history
on this monster or what this what they do or the benefit of living an enclave. You're like
in the middle of a scene and so it'd be like well I thought that was going to be interesting and
there wasn't a lot of dialogue because the main character doesn't talk to anyone and so it
just wasn't an enjoyable story. It was only 350 pages but it felt like it took forever to get
through and I kept falling asleep while reading it partly because i'm old and tired but also partly
because it was boring. Another issue I have is that I said it was marketed and sold as an adult book, this book is so Y.A., this is a young adult novel. The only "adult" thing about it is there's maybe
the word 'fuck' like 10 times and that's it. um I don't work in publishing, I don't know how they
determine that but I think it's bullshit because the writing, the story, the characters is all
young adult but yet it is published as adult and so there's that adult price point and I
think that's fucking rude and i'm mad about it. um like I said they're juniors, so 17- 18 and they're just, she's just so immature and I you know that's fine, she's a teenager. She's just meh and
then annoying and Orion whatever he is, he is very meh too. Everyone was pretty flat, there was no really good character development like El changes a little bit through the story um in
how she interacts with people but other than that. I'm like how do you have a book that's neither
plot driven nor character driven? It was just info driven and that is the worst. Like I didn't
care. I didn't care about the characters or what happened to them or the story because it was just like, let me just give you all the information about this world I created and pepper in little
bits of a story. Another thing was and this bothers me in any book, the chapters were way too long. So I was reading on kindle and I had it on like minutes and so sometimes it would say 45 minutes till the end of the chapter. I'm like that's ridiculous, it would just drag on and on. I hate long chapters.
The, some of the writing was really weird. I've said before I haven't read any of Naomi Novik's
work before so I don't know if this is her typical writing but some of the sentences would just feel so disjointed and I don't know if that's because we were in El's mind, it was in first person the
entire time but sometimes I would read it again like did she? what is? Just how it was structured
felt really weird and I think the first person point of view was very limiting because we only
got through El's eyes and again she's a loner, she's just um negative nancy so we only see
through her interactions and I felt like a third person POV, third person omniscient would have been way better because you would have had better, a better view of the better view of the world and
it would have felt more like world building and slowly learning about it versus El coming across
something and then explaining it to you for three pages. um also I usually say books are too long and this one was dull but I feel like if you're gonna write an "adult fantasy" then you need more than 350 pages if you're going to be this um if you want a world that's so in-depth. So I don't, it's just so
weird to do an adult fantasy duology and spend 75% of the first book really just info dumping and a
little bit of story. Something else um the there it does end up being this kind of romance, if you want to call it that but it's like the dullest romance ever. I watched someone's video and they were
calling it like enemies to lovers and i'm like what? There's nothing, there's no emotion, there's no chemistry, there's everything about this book was very surface level, no depth to me in the book . Also still i'm kind of confused with the magic system because it seemed like there were rules
and then it seemed like kind of when you needed something you could do it? So the controversy
of the book was that the main character is half Welsh, half Indian and there is a part in the book
where she talks about like she smells because she hasn't taken a shower so and that there's a lack
of connection to her Indian side of the family. So her mom and dad went to the Scholamance and like I said when you're a senior you have to get out through this room that's basically like a gauntlet
of monsters and essentially he sacrificed himself to save her because she was pregnant with El and that's all you really talk about or know about him. Her mom did try to go to his or did go to
his side of the family when she was five, her grandmother or great-grandmother saw her, got like this prophecy or premonition or something that she was gonna bring destruction upon the
world and they didn't want anything to do with her. So people have found an issue with that, like why make her Indian. And after reading it, I mean like I agree, the adding the Indian part in just
seems like a diversity check because it doesn't, she could be just white and it would have been
fine. And so about the dirty part though okay there's a part where they're talking about
swapping spells or something and she says that this someone "threw a bit of glamour and a
deodorant spell she said which I suppose was a polite way of hinting that I could stand to
wash more often than I do. I didn't need the hint, I already knew but if it's a choice between
stinking and survival, i'll choose to stink. I've never had a shower more than once a week in here and often it's been longer." And then it's like "If you're thinking that's why I don't have friends, a
bit chicken and egg, anyone who doesn't have enough friends to watch their back can't afford to be well-groomed and that lets people know you don't have enough friends to watch your back which makes them less likely to think you're a valuable ally. However, none of us spends loads of
time showering and when you want to shower generally you ask someone who visibly needs one themselves and it all ends up leveling out but no one ever asks me." So essentially no one showers regularly unless they have a group of friends to go to the showers with because again the monsters, you could die taking a shower. So she being a loner doesn't shower as often because she doesn't always have someone to go to the shower with her. So I don't feel like that was a dig at um Indian people
but i'm not Indian, so if you took offense to that you know I understand, I can't tell you what
to take offense to but I didn't see it as that big a deal. And then there was the issue about
the dreadlocks. So they were talking about hair because one character her hair was really long
which is unusual and so the quote is "Going fully shaved like that is popular if you can afford
it. Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches which you can probably imagine but in case you need help the adult slimy thing comes quietly down at night and provokes
an ovipositor into big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside and creeps away..." and it goes it's gross and goes into that so it um says "The very longest anyone usually lets their hair gets is shoulder
length, mine only gets a couple inches longer than that because no one goes out of their way to
let me know they've got hold of good scissors." So basically they have these lockleeches that
lock onto any kind of hair and so most people keep their hair at least shoulder length, some people
shave their hair to avoid those. So I feel like it was a bad decision to say 'dreadlocks' instead of just saying' locks' because IO thought that when they were showing this passage, that the main character had dreadlocks and she doesn't, it's just like she just chose that word. So I can see where people
think that's like a microaggression, like you're kind of on the sly being like 'dreadlocks are dirty'
because that's the only time it's mentioned. So it's like why did you choose to use that word when you could have just said hair or just said locks? Like anyone who has long locks of hair is prone
to lockleeches, so I can understand that as well. So another part I saw pointed out by another
reviewer was, so they study multiple languages in the Scholomance and one that
she [El] ended up studying was Arabic, but she said "Predictably an Arabic worksheet appeared on my desk the instant I sat down that morning. There wasn't a single word of English on it. The school
didn't even give me a dictionary and judging by the cheery cartoonish illustrations next to the
lines, most notably a man in a car about to mow down a couple of hapless pedestrians, I had the
strong suspicion that it was modern Arabic, too." I'm going to read that again. So "Predictably,
an Arabic worksheet appeared on my desk. There wasn't a single word of English on
it and judging by the cheery cartoonish illustrations next to the lines, most
notably a man in a car about to mow down a couple of hapless pedestrians, I had
the strong suspicion that it was modern Arabic." um now I'm surprised I didn't see that in the
first round of "this book is problematic" because I find that worse than anything else because
what does a cartoon of a man about to drive into pedestrians say instantly that's Arabic ?
Are you saying that you saw that was terrorist and you're like oh yeah this is Arabic? That to
me is the most problematic thing I came across. BIG YIKES, Naomi. So overall, i'm really disappointed in this book. I gave it two stars and i'm just upset because I wanted to love it, I want- I
love school settings so I wanted another book school setting to love, um I was excited
that it seemed like it was going to be adult at a school setting and i'm so sad that it's not. So
I want to reiterate that this book is very young adult besides the use of the word 'fuck' like 10
times um. It is short though if you want to read it and um as for problematic. I mean there are some parts in there that are questionable and then one that to me definitely is a problematic piece
that she must have added in after her sensitivity readers. And this is what pisses me off the most
she pulled that shit that Leigh Bardugo did in Ninth House where your whole story is fucking dull, you cram in some action at the end and then the last line the book is something where you're like
well mother fucker, what's gonna happen there? And she did that with the last line just like Leigh did in in
Ninth House and I hate that shit. Do not write an entire book and then depend on the last 50 pages and the last line to coax readers into reading the next one. Bullshit, terrible, I hate it and honestly
there's not a lot to spoil because nothing happens but I just i'm going to say a spoilery thing for
one minute moment so let me put that up there. So essentially this book like I said nothing
happens for like 70% because it's just them going to classes, trying to survive these monsters,
the Orion dude just keeps killing them and El was like "why are you being my friend?" and it
turns out that he his mom is well known and so everybody thinks like worships him and she doesn't, so that's why, he's like you treat me normal and then there's some kind of thing he kisses her and She's like "i'm not dating him, he's been dating me". It's really stupid. So the last 20%, when Naomi
decided oh I need a plot was that so like the seniors have to run through the gauntlet thing
but there was like a hole coming in through the wall where the monsters were starting to get into the school more regularly and so they, El and her little group, decide to patch it up but the seniors
are mad because they're like so there's gonna be extra monsters down there for us so majority of
us aren't gonna make it out so the seniors and these juniors team up and they go down there
to distract them out while somebody is fixing like the scorching thing that's in the
basement because it was broken like when the school first opened, that normally
would like kill a lot of the monsters. And so some of them are standing there fighting
off the mals and then some are fixing the thing and then they fix it, woo and so then there's
less monsters for the seniors and that's it. That's the book and then the last line she gets
a letter from her mom and the letter from her mom says "My darling girl, I love you, have courage my mother wrote and keep far away from Orion Lake." That was the last line, her boyfriend
now her mom says to keep away from him. Naomi, what the fuck is this? Those are my
feelings on that book, please let me know down below if you have read it and what your
thoughts are. Are you going to read it? Did the um the accusations, the racism, the drama put you off from reading it? I would love to know. Anyway give this video a thumbs up if you liked
it, please subscribe, um please check out my description, got links to my social media,
to voting, to links to issues that are going around going on around the world um. Curtis and I thank you for watching and we hope that you take care of yourself and we'll see you in our
next video. BYE! oh they're getting a new thing oh curtis hey boo-boo, oh you're looking
good chile, he just keeps leaning
