Everything at the Scholomance builds towards graduation. Not in an ordinary finals and grades sense. Graduation for a wizard means fighting your way across a room full of monsters to reach the exit portal. Survival depends on the quality of your spells, your allies, and your gear, and almost all the rich kids from the Enclaves will make it. People like Galadriel mostly don't. Life's a bitch and then you spend eternity going mad in the belly of something called a Maw Mouth.

Except she's coming into her own power as a walking weapon of mass destruction, she had a valuable spellbook, some allies, and her sort-of boyfriend Orion Lake is a once-in-a-generation monster slaying prodigy (that her mother used her one letter to warn against Orion at the end of the last book is a problem for Future Gal). The only problem is that as the last year starts out, the Scholomance seems to take a personal interest in making her die, with a truly insane schedule.

The first 80% of the book is pleasant enough, workmanlike retreads of the points of the first book. The real joy comes in the last 20%, when Galadriel realizes that she doesn't have to play by the rules she hates, she can remake those rules. I'm not going to spoil the ending, because it's worth the price of admission alone, but wow! If the last book ended with a bomb, this one ends by diving out a window as the entire building explodes, and I pretty much have to read book three next.