Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
The Golden Enclaves
by Naomi Novik
The Golden Enclaves did not stick the landing.
We pick up right where book two left off, El on the outside with her book of precious enclave building spells, the monsters of the world lured into the Scholomance which has been abandoned in the void, and Orion Lake still inside. Fixing El and fixing the world is going to have to wait, because something is attacking enclaves by destroying their foundations.
There's a whirlwind tour of the wider wizarding world, and it is pretty cool to see the various unreal places and what a senior witch looks like. But the basic purity of plot and characterization gets lost in an ethical metaphor with is about as subtle as a slap to the face.
See, magic takes power, which can be generated in two ways. One is strict mana, internally from the caster and willing allies, on banked reserves which accumulate at a trickle. The fast and easy path is malia, pulling energy from living things, which escalates from "harmless" beetles and patches of grass to bloody human sacrifice. Each act of malia creates a wound which generates a monster, which will be trouble for another wizard later on, especially a young one without much power or knowledge.
In particular, enclaves are built on a foundation stone in the void, and the act of setting that foundation requires a human sacrifice and the creation of a maw mouth, the implacable worst horror in the world. The home that every wizard wants is built on unspeakable polluting evil.
We wouldn't know anything about the foundations of our lives being a toxic mess for our children
Oh, and there's also some stuff about Orion Lake being a human maw mouth, a monster wearing the skin of a boy, and his mother being the most evil witch in centuries. But this doesn't really matter, and El completes her shift from protagonist to Young Adult Main Character, living in a world defined by how much people understand and appreciate her immense power and morale clarity.
On a sentence to sentence level, this book is fine, but the series proves that questions are better than answers. I spent my time with The Last Graduate racing to see how it ended. I put this book aside for the night with two chapters left because I knew it could only go one way.
We pick up right where book two left off, El on the outside with her book of precious enclave building spells, the monsters of the world lured into the Scholomance which has been abandoned in the void, and Orion Lake still inside. Fixing El and fixing the world is going to have to wait, because something is attacking enclaves by destroying their foundations.
There's a whirlwind tour of the wider wizarding world, and it is pretty cool to see the various unreal places and what a senior witch looks like. But the basic purity of plot and characterization gets lost in an ethical metaphor with is about as subtle as a slap to the face.
See, magic takes power, which can be generated in two ways. One is strict mana, internally from the caster and willing allies, on banked reserves which accumulate at a trickle. The fast and easy path is malia, pulling energy from living things, which escalates from "harmless" beetles and patches of grass to bloody human sacrifice. Each act of malia creates a wound which generates a monster, which will be trouble for another wizard later on, especially a young one without much power or knowledge.
In particular, enclaves are built on a foundation stone in the void, and the act of setting that foundation requires a human sacrifice and the creation of a maw mouth, the implacable worst horror in the world. The home that every wizard wants is built on unspeakable polluting evil.
We wouldn't know anything about the foundations of our lives being a toxic mess for our children
Oh, and there's also some stuff about Orion Lake being a human maw mouth, a monster wearing the skin of a boy, and his mother being the most evil witch in centuries. But this doesn't really matter, and El completes her shift from protagonist to Young Adult Main Character, living in a world defined by how much people understand and appreciate her immense power and morale clarity.
On a sentence to sentence level, this book is fine, but the series proves that questions are better than answers. I spent my time with The Last Graduate racing to see how it ended. I put this book aside for the night with two chapters left because I knew it could only go one way.