I didn’t expect to read a book from the perspective of an emotional teenage girl and love every page.
And yet, here we are.
So, premise time. In this world, there are magical people, and not magical people (they’re not called muggles though). Raising a magical kid is hard, because there are a whole host of creatures, called maleficaria (or mals) which love that sweet mana inside the kids, and will eat them all up. The vast majority of magical kids, out in the world, would end up eaten. So, off to magic school they go, where there’s a much better 50% chance of being eaten by a mal.
First off, amazing take on the magical school trope already.
And here is our MC, El (short for Galadriel), because her parents were feeling a bit dickish when they named her. In this world, there’s a strong principle of balance, and because El’s mother is such a goody-two-shoes, helping people all the time for free and just being as saintly as possible, El gets powers and skills exactly the opposite. She is—if she choses to be—a walking disaster that could give the Four Horsemen a run for their money. Except El doesn’t want to be an evil superpower, she just wants what normal teenage girls want: not to be eaten alive.
Entering as the secondary character is Orion, an upstanding student protecting all others by hunting down the mals in the school. He is suspicious of the evil superpower that El might be, and initially follows her around. What comes from all of this is a spoiler, but it contains some of the best characterisations, interactions, and hilariously on-point dialogue I have ever read.
In fact, if the characters were the only thing going for this book, I’d still love it. Add the magic system, the mals trying to eat students, and the decaying inter-dimensional school to the mix, and this is one you need to go and read. Please.
