I am so angry right now. I feel frustrated and I want to cry and hit something because I wanted to like this book SO bad and was so excited about it, but I ended up despising it with my entire being. This should have been a duology is all I can say. A smart editor could have easily condensed it into a 500-pages each book, and that would have done wonders for pacing. There is no easy way to say this: but this book sucked big time. The plot is all over the place, I had no idea what Novik was trying to pull with a novel where the characters spend 25% of the time in airplanes... yup, I'm not even kidding. I was annoyed throughout by the shit ton of expositioning and mindless telling that would go on. There would be three whole pages of info dumping between two dialogues, to the point that I would have forgotten what even the conversation was about. Honestly, I spent the majority of this book simply dissociated. My brain just telling me again and again, "this is boring. why are we doing this again? oh, what are the characters talking about??"

Once again, a lot of the plot would have unfolded beautifully if this book could have been condensed into the previous book. But then again a lot of the plot twists (all of them except one) were pretty damn obvious. And I am not trying to show off how smart I was in figuring stuff out. There were legit reviews and questions on Goodreads around the time book 1 came out that easily predicted how stuff would go down and they were 98% spot on! One thing I absolutely despise is when the author takes the readers to be complete idiots. Yes, a lot of us are duds but give us the benefit of the doubt! I like books that encourage readers to do a bit of heavy lifting and don't just present the story the way Novik does here. A fuck ton of telling and not showing.

My favorite thing about the previous book was the characters and the relationships between them. I've always believed that Novik is a master at writing female friendships, and El, Aadhya, Liu, and Chloe's friendship was my favorite from The Last Graduate. The Golden Enclaves meanwhile, throws the intricately built relationships into a dumpster fire by introducing random new characters that we are supposed to suddenly care about. Honestly, the only constant in this trilogy has been my love for Gwen Higgins and I had been so excited to finally have Gwen get her screen time, but that turned out to be a broken dream as well. She was just as cool as I imagined her to be, and honestly, that's the only reason this got 2 stars instead of 1. That and the fact that this series had so much potential when book 1 came out but it all went downhill from there mainly due to poor pacing and shitty editing/marketing choices.

Maybe this will come across as a satisfying conclusion to the Scholomance trilogy, I however found this to be a complete and utter waste of my time and an insult to my intelligence. Probably going to stick to Novik's standalone stuff because that's where she seems to be at least decent.


Before reading:
I can't believe I was lured into reading another book that ended on a MASSIVE cliffhanger; one might think I would have learned better after Uncle Rick pulled the same stunt at the end of The Mark of Athena, but here I am again...We better get a pub date of early-mid 2022 😐