The Scholomance is arguably the most fascinating magic school I’ve attended to date. Unlike other magic schools, it straddles the boundary between the physical world and “the void,” a malleable space that operates on the power of collective belief, hence all the blueprints on the walls to keep the structure reinforced. The heart of this round, complex design is a giant, corkscrew-like mechanism that rotates the resident halls from top to bottom while the classrooms, library, and cafeteria remain in place, every graduation day.

In this world, being magical is more of a curse than a blessing. Voracious monsters that feed on mana (one’s own magical energy as opposed to malia, which is the taking of magical energy from living things) are essentially drawn to you, especially when you’re at your ripest during puberty.

For us pagewalkers, our first assignment was to visit and study a magic school of our choosing. At first, after having practiced so many of the same old enchantments in other written universes, I wasn’t very excited about this. Learning how to conjure fire or raise the dead sounds thrilling when you haven’t done so for the umpteenth time. No matter how many layers of nuance there are, they all end up blending and blurring and speaking the same language. Maybe you risk burning yourself, or setting the classroom aflame at worst, but such challenges pale in comparison to those found in the Scholomance.

Unlike my peers, I was itching for a challenge with much higher stakes, the ultimate test, and A Deadly Education answered.

You must think I’m mad for having stayed in an entirely isolated, underground trap of a building with flesh-eating nightmares running amuck. Truly, I cannot bring magic and spells from one universe with me into another. That part of my being is rewritten by natural law. My only unchanging magical trait is the one with which I’d been born. So, I had to learn the ropes of mana and malia in this world as best and as quickly as possible.

The Scholomance was built to protect the magical and weed out the weak at the same time. The complexity of its design made navigation for the monsters difficult—but not impossible—to reach the students. There were no teachers to defend us, let alone teach, so we had to make friends and keep them (without getting attached because death was a frequent visitor), never daring to venture out of our rooms alone, for the sake of survival. Woe unto you if you had none, like Galadriel “El” Higgins.

El is the protagonist of the story, though she often battled with that word. She kept to herself and trusted nobody, but if you managed to melt her icy exterior and grow close to her like I did, she could chew your ear off. Oh, she could talk. I feared her incessant rambling would kill me before the school did. No, really. She talks.

But I understood. You see, El is lonely. Being the prophesied bringer of death and mass destruction will do that to you. Not that the other students were aware, but nobody was ever particularly comfortable around her. They’d always sensed something ominous about the girl, like how animals can sense the stirring of thunderstorms.

Fortunately, I’m drawn to intense and complex characters who walk the gray line between black-and-white morality, on paper and in person. Approaching El was certainly awkward. She was immediately baffled and suspicious of me, figuring I wanted to use her in some way because friendships here were only strategic. She tried pushing me away, but I remained supportive and shared her rawest sympathies toward the end about the enclaves, which are basically super-powered groups of rich wizards.

I did not get to see El embrace her fated, inner dark sorceress, but at least her story didn’t end with Orion Lake, a fellow student and a monster slayer, saving her with the cliché power of love. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been tempted to draw the prophecy out of her and direct it. Perhaps it will unfold somewhere in the next two books and surprise me.

I hope I’m not disappointed. It might not reflect well on my grade.