Lucas Blogs About Books

Don't graphic designers know that bloggers will be taking crummy, screen-glare-ridden pictures of these books? So, what's this book's deal? A Deadly Education  is the first entry in a new fantasy series called The Scholomance by Naomi Novik. Oh, she wrote that Spinning Silver  novel you blogged about a couple of years ago. That she did. You'll recall that I liked it. I do recall that. So is this another one of those fractured fairy tale type stories? No. This is more of a take-off on the magic school genre. You mean like a parody or pastiche? Hmm, maybe that's not quite accurate. The setting or characters are necessarily meant to invoke any pre-existing fantasy stories or series, but I also think that Novik is taking aim at some of the tropes of the magic school genre. But let's talk about the novel itself. We're introduced to our protagonist, Galadriel — yes, named for that Galadriel — or El, complaining about Orion Lake, the most popular boy in the Scholo...

Oooh, shiny! So, what's this book's deal? All right, so you like fairy tales, right? I mean, I feel like fairy tales as a genre are too big to fail, I guess. Like whatever I think, they'll keep on going. Well, I guess that's true. Anyway, this book starts with one of the characters explaining how a Rumpelstiltskin-like fairy tale is really about skipping out on your debts. And in a way this novel is an extended fairy tale about paying your debts. That's not all of your synopsis . . . is it? Of course not. Last year, I read Uprooted  by Naomi Novik (who you may note is also the author of this novel), and I quite enjoyed it. It's a sort of fairy tale-like story about a young girl who becomes a wizard's apprentice in a somewhat fictionalized version of medieval Poland called Polnya. Meanwhile, Spinning Silver  takes place in a somewhat fictionalized version of a later medieval Lithuania called Lithvas (at least, I'm pretty sure it...