They’re utterly distracting and I have no idea why so many people praise Novik’s writing style. In fact, the main climax of ADE is so anti-climatic solely because Novik spent too much time stalling a supposedly tension-filled scene with an overabundance of descriptions for various small repairs the students were trying to make.Įl’s “if you…, then you can…” sentence structure must have been used at least a hundred times in a very short 300 page book. The infodumps might be “useful” for worldbuilding, but they ultimately take away from the impact of “real-time” events like oh, idk… battling demonic critters and escaping near-death. The prose seemingly goes out its way to avoid the action happening right in front of you to instead open up El’s random monster Pokedex entry of the day and give you a longass tangent, forcing you to forget what was even happening in real-time in the first place. The focus is very much on the nitty, gritty details of constructing things and collecting materials necessary to complete projects for constructing magical items while rarely showing things happen in real-time as opposed to El’s endless stream of repetitive “if you… then…” hypotheticals. It is overwrought with meaningless descriptions of things that shouldn’t matter as much as they do. The backstory with her mother and sort of last-minute tacked on parallel to Orion’s backstory was somewhat compelling, but it could have been so much moreso if not for the main weaknesss A Deadly Education (ADE): Naomi Novik’s writing style. Galadriel herself is actually not such a bad character once you get to know her.

Imagine a DIY manual for furniture repair and endless descriptions of a girl doing homework. A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik

A deadly education series book 3