Hogwarts meets Hunger Games in this thrilling magical story about a magical school infested with monster that will kill you and has about a 30-40% percent chance of graduating alive. In a world where there are students gifted with “mana” they go to the school of Scholomance, where they learn spells, crafting, and most of all, must learn how to survive attacks from literal monsters who want to eat them due to their magic. Galadriel, a student in her junior of Scholomance, just wants to make it out alive, secure a position for an enclave that will protect her and enable her to have a future and to take care of her mom. She has a particular affinity, that she has been keeping hidden, and has maintained a strict distance from everyone in order to survive because at the end of the day only you can look out for yourself, or so she thought. All of that goes crashing into flames when she is rescued by the school’s number one shinning knight in armor, Orion Lake. She absolutely loathes him, and it’s completely understandable. He keeps saving people, which means more students will likely survive, and more monsters go hungry, and her chances of having a secure future plummet. The thing is, Orion latches himself onto El, he constantly is just there. He walks her to class, he eats with her, he rescues her. The guy is just constantly helping her and wearing her hatred down. ( which completely reminds me of that one episode in New Girl)

Anyways, El finds herself now working through social politics and proposals she has never had to before. Especially when she finds new alliances, new horrors, and more magic waiting to be unleashed. This story gave me strong Hogwarts but make it horror vibes, or more like Hogwarts from the perspective of anyone who wasn’t Harry Potter and co and were left to deal with unspeakable horrors built into a magical school that operated on its own terms. The dynamic between El and Orion gave me strong Draco and Harry Vibes with El being the pessimestic more dark magic user and being fed up with Orion being the hero with people avoiding El because she gave off a “dark” vibe while Orion definitely was the Harry Potter-esque guy, he’s from a famous family, is extremely popular, constantly doing dumb battle things but making it work, and friendly but not really close to people who want to know him for his fame. So I definitely enjoyed the friendship between El and her allies (I’ll leave that up to you to find out who) because it’s sweet seeing El slowly open herself up and understand what having real friends is. The relationship growth between her and Orion was also really great to read. I just had a fun time reading this story and can’t wait to dive into the next book!