El is a magic-user in a world where 90% of magical children are eaten by monsters before they come of age. To keep magical children safe, many powerful magical communities banned together to create a school, which is suspended in the Void, and so inhabited by a much small percentage of monsters. In the Scholomance, only 40% of children are eaten, and the lucky and powerful make alliances to watch either other's backs. El is not lucky, but she is powerful, and she has survived into her third year of magical education with hard work and extreme diligence. But graduation is nearing and if she hopes to get out of the school alive, she will have to do perhaps the hardest thing of all, which is make a friend. This a fast-paced and compelling riff on the magical boarding school story, clearly writing against Harry Potter. There is no central villain in this tale except how people with privilege will do anything to maintain it, and will leverage the promise of privilege to divide the less advantaged and turn them against each other. The cast of the story is deliberately diverse, and languages and cultures are built into the magic systems and worldbuilding in an engaging way. There is a setup of a romance between the popular golden boy and our grumpy, pessimistic main character, but it managed to avoid a lot of YA romance pitfalls and I am curious to see how it will unfold in the sequel. I listened to the 11 hour audiobook in 2 days.