★★★★★ El is not a gun

The Golden Enclaves

Naomi Novik

What we learned from Book 1, A Deadly Education: El (that would be our heroine and first-person narrator) is not capable of sacrificing others to save herself. In Book 2, The Last Graduate, we learned that El is a thermonuclear warhead -- a destructive force so powerful as to be entirely incomparable to other magic-users. We also know that El's own great-grandmother, the Speaker of Mumbai, made a prophecy about El, "She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world". (The enclaves are polities in which the world's most powerful wizards live together.)

In 1999, Brad Bird made an excellent animated film, The Iron Giant, about a sentient robot weapon. The Iron Giant says of himself "I am not a gun". This is the problem El faces -- how not to be a gun... She writes that she is her "own personal trolley problem to solve".

If you have read A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, you will not be very surprised by the first half of The Golden Enclaves. Lots of cool magical battles, personal struggles, quasipolitical manipulations, etc. Also, El's mother Gwen Higgins, whom we knew from previous books to be a rigidly ethical world-famous magical healer deeply opposed to the enclaves, finally steps into the story as a full-fledged and important character.

At about the 50% point, however, the plot makes a turn that I didn't see coming. It is at about this point that the book begins to justify its title, "The Golden Enclaves". The second half of the book is all about the mystery of the enclaves.

I think I don't want to give away any more. If you read the first two books, you know you want this. It's a rewarding and, to me, unexpected journey. Give it a try.

Does this one end with a cliffhanger? No, it does not.

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