The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

 

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

 

The Golden Enclaves ends The Scholomance trilogy, and what a wild ride it has been. El, the sourly mage-to-be, has spent four years trying not to become an evil maleficer in the school for mages that has tried its best to kill her. She’s desperately trying to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of her as a destroyer of enclaves, the safe havens of mages. She’s now out of the school, which she has destroyed, and she’s saved everyone. All except Orion Lake, the boy she’s reluctantly come to love.

The book begins right from the cliff-hanger ending of the previous one. Orion has pushed El out of the school and stayed behind to fight a maw-mouth, the worst monster there is, a hungering blob that devours the living, never stopping. She tries to save him, but he won’t let her.

Grieving and traumatised, she’s moping in her mother’s yurt in the healing commune, when her friends from London enclave ask her help in killing a maw-mouth, a near-impossible feat which she’s done before. Someone’s attacking the enclaves by emptying them from their protective magic, which either plunges them into the void, killing everyone inside, or weakens the wards, opening them for monster attacks.

With nothing better to do, she sets out to help, with her friends facilitating her, as her ability to survive the outside world is sketchy at best, thanks to her isolated childhood in the commune. And then she learns the secret behind the enclaves, the evil magic they’re based on. She has to decide, if she wants to save the enclaves, or become the destroyer of the prophecy after all. It’s not an easy decision and nothing in the book is black and white, good or evil. Everything she does has consequences, and some of them are catastrophic.

This was an excellent book and a wonderful conclusion to the trilogy. The book moves smoothly from one disaster to another, forcing El to reveal exactly how powerful she is. All her closest friends are with her, ready to help, which she’s sort of coming to terms with. She isn’t without enemies who have waited for her to graduate for a long time, but she also learns that she has allies and a family that loves her.

And she doesn’t give up on Orion, if her plan basically is to kill the maw-mouth that got him. But he has a surprise for her—and the reader. Orion has been a tragic figure from the start, an exploited hero who wants nothing more than to help others by killing monsters. I badly wanted a good ending for him, even if it would mean putting him out of his misery. It’s not an easy decision for El, but in the end, she knows what she must do—which was nothing I could’ve predicted.

An ending to a great trilogy is seldom perfect, but I am perfectly satisfied with this one. It’s not a fairy-tale or happily-ever-after ending, but it’s good enough for everyone, and it suits the world and the characters. And El may even have found a way to become content after all.