In my experience, most series hold to a similar pattern, especially trilogies. The first book is fantastic, amazing, I want to devour the whole series immediately. The second book is good, but not as good, making me lower my expectations. The last book (or if there’s more than three, all subsequent books) is either on par with or just a little less good than the second. That is really what I was expecting with the Scholomance series. A Deadly Education was very good. The Last Graduate was entertaining, but it had some major issues. Considering that The Golden Enclaves takes place outside the very cool Scholomance setting (and in my experience, when a setting or situation that I liked changes it’s almost always a change for the worse), I had pretty low expectations for this book. 

But I was surprised. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And not even in the way I enjoyed The Last Graduate, which was not great in an objective sense but still a lot of fun. This one was straight-up very good. It’s the rare third book that surpasses the second, but The Golden Enclaves manages it. 

There are several potential reasons for that. First, it picked up exactly where the last book left off, but it managed to make me not feel like I missed anything, despite having read the previous book nearly a year ago. Second, Orion is not physically in a lot of the book and the romance is hardly there at all, so my extremely low tolerance for characters being stupid over love (a very common YA trait, I’ve noticed) was hardly tested. Third, the kids in the Scholomance may have gotten somewhat used to El being absurdly powerful but the adults in the rest of the world were definitely not, so I got plenty of my favorite thing: Other characters being utterly astonished by how absurdly powerful the protagonist is. And finally, most especially, I got answers. 

In my review of The Last Graduate, I casually wondered if there was a reason why there were two absurdly powerful magical teenagers the same age, but I really didn’t expect to get one. This kinda felt like a series that went for “rule of cool” over any particular reason for things being that way. But there is a reason – for everything. There’s a reason for Orion’s power, there’s a reason for El’s power, there’s a reason for the Golden Stone Sutras and the mormouths and the very foundations of every single enclave itself. It’s all connected. The second book felt like it dropped a lot of threads, but this book gathers everything ack together and reveals so many secrets and answered so many questions I never thought to ask. 

The Golden Enclaves is everything I want in a book. Enjoyable characters, a fascinating world that manages to be interesting even outside the school setting, an absurdly powerful protagonist, and layers upon layers of secrets and conspiracies enabled and protected by magic that the protagonist is bound and determine to uncover (and she’s so absurdly powerful that nobody can really stop her). This book was so good that it redeemed all the flaws of The Last Graduate. For a fantasy about a recent high school graduate with way too much anger and the absurd amounts of magical power required to keep punching through problems until she gets at answers, it’s surprisingly multilayered and complex. I have yet to read a disappointment from Naomi Novik, and this whole series is no exception (assuming, of course, that you enjoy absurdly powerful protagonists).