 Hey guys, it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about deadly education by Naomi Novik. I hate it uprooted, unpopular opinion I know, but I really hate it uprooted. That sin, because so many people told me that spinning silver, they thought I'd lying better, even though I didn't like uprooted. I was not writing Naomi Novik off as an author that I won't ever like and I still intend to try spinning silver because I just can't learn my lesson, but I hated deadly education. However, I hated it for entirely different reasons than I hated uprooted. So she's making different mistakes. It's kind of not my fault. I was right that this would be really different from uprooted. It is really different from uprooted and I hate it for totally different reasons. So I may very well end up hating spinning silver, but I'll bet it'll be for different reasons again. So deadly education, I couldn't pass it up. Probably I showed up. This is kind of following the trend of dark academia, which is really popping these days, which I'm buying without a lot of dark academia, so I'm all for it. That's why I thought I'd give this a go anyway. It's kind of like a dark Harry Potter. It's a school for witchcraft and wizardry. However, instead of being a magical place of wonder and some danger, the whole thing is just constant danger to the point of not feeling dangerous. So this book is pretty short. So is Harry Potter. And Harry Potter does a much better job of introducing you to a world, enough that you understand the world, but not so much that it removes all mystery and introducing you to characters and just kind of introducing you to a world and characters and magic and stuff, also telling a story that you're interested in. I know we all hate Harry Potter because J.H. Rowling is a witch. Ironic. It's still a better book. So I'm just singing. It is. Deadly Education. You know how in Mean Girls, there's like the voiceover explaining to you the sort of social hierarchy of the cafeteria, of the lunchroom and how social stuff works in high school? Deadly Education is like that voiceover for an entire book filled with deadly magic. And it's so annoying after about two seconds. Like I was willing to forgive how info don't be and how much exposition I was getting in the beginning and I was like, because, okay, we're getting introduced to a world. It's not my favorite way of delivering that information but fine, you'll get us caught up and then we can have this story. Except the entire story keeps stopping to give us some more information about the world. And it got to the point where I was like, look, you either need to find a better way of explaining this shit to us, have footnotes, have a glossary in the back or just, you know what, leave it mysterious because we do not need to know all this stuff. Leave some of it for us to figure out or it doesn't need to be explained because this feels like reading an encyclopedia. It's like reading Ikea instructions for a school of deadly magic. And it's not fun, not even a little bit. And at least if you have a situation where a character is asking a bunch of expository questions or being asked a bunch of expository questions and then in dialogue we get a lot of slightly unrealistic but helpful exposition because of these questions of like, well, what is this place? Why would they do that? Well, they might do this because of XYZ, at least. Then we are developing the personalities of the characters while we are getting told this information. However, our main character in deadly education has no friends and is kind of a loner. So she's thinking exposition to herself or thinking it at the audience. So we're not even getting characters developed in an expository dialogue. It's just a bunch of information being spewed at us constantly. Every time the character thinks something, sees something, notices something, has to do something, she stops in her head to tell us about the history of it, the mechanics of it, where she learned it, how she learned it, how other people tend to learn it. And it's kind of bookended by like some slightly quippy jargon to kind of like, as if it's gonna trick you into thinking this isn't happening, that these are not infodumps but they are infodumps. And just because you start your infodump by saying like, and wouldn't you know it, we did it this way instead of the way that people usually do it and then a paragraph of how people usually do it. Where it's just like, it's just still like an encyclopedia entry. I don't care that you began it with a quip and ended it with another quip. It's, the quips are annoying. They're not funny and they're not tricking me. This is all just infodumps. And then after all of that info dumping, the truth is this world doesn't actually make much sense. Every time I was getting more and more info dumped at me, I was like, I'm not being swept away by a story. So like maybe there's a million things that don't make sense about Harry Potter but it's kind of like a fun story to get lost in. So you kind of like, it doesn't kind of really matter to you that much while you're reading it. You're like, I guess if I think about it for too long it probably doesn't make sense. But like I'm having fun here. There isn't much of a story because it's really just constantly infodumping at you. And so I spend my whole time thinking about how none of that actually makes any sense and how this is not a sustainable way for a school to be. And no one would go here. No one would do this. Everyone would be dead and this is stupid. And why do I care about any of this? And I don't even like the main character. All she is is a vehicle for exposition and occasional quips. And she's not funny. She's not sympathetic. None of her emotional motivations make any sense. Like literally make no sense. The few times that she was actually making decisions that are kind of like plot and emotional decisions rather than giving us info dumps. Every single time she would even think to herself as like once again, as if to trick the audience into thinking that like, oh, but it's actually fine, except it's not fine. She would think to herself how like, it would really make more sense for me to feel X, Y, Z. But I didn't. Okay, but why though? Because you're absolutely right. It would make a lot more sense for you to feel the way that you just said you should feel. So please tell me why you don't feel that way because humans don't work like this. If the stuff that she thought was her motivation she would actively think to herself, well, even though that was my motivation this whole time, you know what? I don't actually want that. And you're like, okay. So what do you want? The only thing I had to go off of you told me your motivations were because I'm really not getting a sense of who you are based on anything else going on. All I have is what you tell me to go off of. And you just told me that even though you've been telling me this whole time this is what you want, you don't actually want it. So who even are you? What do you want? Why do I care? I don't care. For a short book it was a slog and I never felt suspense or danger. Even though this school, like people are dying all the time. And it's like a regular occurrence at the school and it's treated so casually that I as the reader felt no suspense. I felt no danger. I felt no excitement. I mean, Harry Potter, like again, like the school is kind of needlessly dangerous, but I would still feel suspense like the dark forest or them going into like sections of the Hogwarts castle that are not supposed to be, you'd feel like, uh-oh, like something could happen. Something might be dangerous. Uh-oh. Voldemort. Yeah, everything is constantly so dangerous that it ceases to mean anything. There's no point of reference. There's nothing, there's no counterpoint to it. There's nothing to balance it out. It's just constantly, this could kill you. This will kill you. This regularly does kill people. This almost killed me. This is about to kill me. This will probably kill me tomorrow. And everyone's just like, yeah well, I guess you just live with the fact that you're about to die and that's where everybody would be either losing their minds or be dead with this constant level. It's just, it's not badass. It's just not believable. I hated it. I hated it so much. I hated it probably worse than Uprooted. Because it's almost, it almost felt here like, so Uprooted has an extremely soft magic system. Here, this is arguably a more hard magic system because you're going to a school for it. There's rules that are constantly constantly being info dumped at you. But honestly, the rules don't make a whole lot of sense, especially if you think about them for more than two seconds, which you don't have anything else to think about because there isn't much of a plot. So I kept thinking to myself that like, it felt like she, because she had such a soft magic system before and uprooted that she was like, well, now this is a hard magic system. So I really got to spell out all these rules all of the time. And I'm like, no, you can let us learn as we go or you can have a character that doesn't really know things and have them like have us learn with the character, there's options for this, but you didn't do either of those. So like if she had left it where like characters kind of are talking amongst each other about things they already know and then you as the reader have to pick up from context clues what's going on, at least then you feel like you're discovering things as opposed to just having somebody spew explanations at you, like reading a manual and you're like, well, that's not fun. You're just spewing an encyclopedia entry about this school at me. I'm not absorbing any of this. I don't care about any of this. It was awful. It was terrible. I gave it two stars because it's very basic level, the concept of a really dark kind of version of Hogwarts that's more deadly, more adult. I'm all for that. That sounds like a cool premise, but this was so horribly, horribly executed that just all the yikes, all the yikes, yikes, yikes, yikes. So let me know in the comments down below if you've read Deadly Education, if you liked Deadly Education, if you like Naomi Novick's other books, if you hated Uprooted as well, if you like me, we're willing to give this another chance and we're let down or you're afraid you will be known from my review. Whatever you wanna let me know. I post videos on Saturdays, also at other random times, but definitely Saturdays so like and subscribe and I'll see you when I see you. Bye.