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The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance, by Naomi Novik. Del Ray, 2022
Starting just minutes after the end of Lesson Two, Lesson Three starts with Galadriel “El” Higgins having just gotten all grades of the students in the Scholomance out alive- all except one. The door way has closed, forever, with one person left behind- Orion Lake, her love. And, given the circumstances, he has almost certainly been eaten by a maw-mouth. A death which is not actually death, but an eternity of conscious suffering. El feels she cannot leave her love to suffer like that; she- the only one who can kill a maw-mouth- must somehow return to the decaying Scholomance and kill the maw-mouth, freeing Orion to die completely. But she can’t do it alone. Re-enter her allies from the previous book, for a brief return to the Scholomance. Then the action moves to the existing Enclaves. Someone is attacking the enclaves, tearing them down, one after another. El has never even been in an Enclave, and has no idea how they are formed. The answer to that is pretty horrifying. But she has her precious book of sutras about creating Golden Enclaves, and figures she can put the world right, with her allies supplying the mana she needs.
I had problems with this volume. There isn’t the kind of character growth we saw in the first two books. As a narrator, El is still sarcastic and amusing, but she’s become someone who is never once tempted by taking the malia road for ease, and she keeps thinking how much better than other wizards she is because of this. Then she has sex with a girl she doesn’t even like, and never gives it a thought. The first time, she believes Orion is dead, but the second time they are just sort of bored and have the spare time. Now, I have no idea what the wizard world thinks about sex. It is stated that the girl and her partner have an open relationship, but I don’t think El and Orion have even had a chance to talk about it. Or I missed it when they did.
Then there is how disjointed the action is. When El gets Orion back, there is a (very) brief idle, and then there is non-stop running from one enclave to the other, killing mals, learning about how enclaves are formed, meeting Orion’s skeevy parents, making alliances that El really doesn’t like… it’s almost too much. Coming back to the book after a pause in reading, I frequently found myself having to go back a few pages to try and figure out where El was and what crisis she was currently taking charge of. The pacing is sort of “info dump- fast and sudden action- info dump- fast and sudden action” which I just found difficult to get into.
Was I disappointed? Yes. The first two volumes are definitely better. If Novik wrote a fourth novel to continue this story, would I read it? Definitely!