This started off pretty strong with a dark academia, murderous, magical setting. Our main gal, Galadriel (yes, named after lord of the rings), is a loser, outcast, fuck-them-privileged-kids, machine of a woman. (She talks about how unwanted she is SO often.) She is constantly getting almost murdered by the school and being saved by School HeroTM Orion, who she is incredibly ungrateful towards. This isn’t because she hopes to die, it’s because she has an affinity for Mass DestructionTM and she could save herself if he didn’t enter the gotdam room and make himself also a target for her murder spells. I enjoyed the concept of this quite a bit! The rules of the school are unique and the dynamics don’t feel as trope-y as I feared they would. 

All that being said, dear God, this was an info dump. About 50% of the book is El just monologuing, and 2/3 of that monologuing is lore or the explanation of mechanics. I’m so glad that this was a meticulously thought out world and magic system; that’s hard to do! However, I don’t like reading fantastical textbooks. I will not lie to you, I started speed reading and skimming shit and I absolutely did not need all of it. Also, Miss Girl is supposed to have a stupid amount of power despite never using the Bad Magic of this world, and that never gets shown in a way that’s satisfying to the reader. None of the other characters ever see or react to a display of her power. There’s one bit about halfway through that’s interesting, but nobody else witnesses it, and she immediately throws it under the rug. At the end, there’s a snippet of *something*, but it’s equally as dissatisfying. I understand that there are meant to be more books to this. Dang, tho. I might read the second one and hope it’s less textbook-y, but we shall see.