This book is weird, but once it finds its pace it’s good weird. I tried to explain what it was and came up with subverting some Harry Potter tropes meets Battle Royale, kind of? It took me a bit to get a grip on it because I wasn’t sure if it was aiming for a healthy dose of humour.

An ostracized dark sorceress to be in a magical school that eats the students for fuel, cliques and good marks are literalizations making the school do or die, and the “chosen one” trope is this privileged idiot trying to save people but is actually making more problems for them, mostly.

It took me a minute to sort this out. But what really grounds this is Ell’s character arc and the interrogation of the social dynamics in high school. It’s got plenty of heart balancing the humour, and is actually fairly subversive of the genre, making it a page turner.

Ended up enjoying it quite a bit and would read another instalment.