I believe getting advance review copies is a great privilege, hence why I always make a point of reading them through to the end before leavDNF at 50%
I believe getting advance review copies is a great privilege, hence why I always make a point of reading them through to the end before leaving a review. In this case, however, I must make an exception. Despite being one of my most anticipated releases of the year, The Sins on Their Bones turned out to be so excruciatingly boring that I simply could not bring myself to finish it.
To begin with, I feel like the story started in the wrong place. The characters kept referencing past events that marked both their personal lives and the history of their country, but because we don’t actually see these events unfolding or these characters bonding, it’s hard to get invested in them. Even though the stakes are literally as high as they get, we are given no reason to care about the fate of this world or the people in it. This felt like reading the sequel to a first novel that doesn’t exist.
Which brings me to my second problem: the pacing. In the two hundred pages I read, pretty much nothing happened. Characters did little but sit around moping, talking about their past, and revisiting their trauma. Alexey, the villain we’re supposed to root against, was the only one driving the plot forward and therefore the only compelling character out of the whole cast. Call me cold hearted, but I can’t bring myself to be interested in a protagonist who does nothing but sulk, drink, and have rebound sex with his equally bland best friend.
Speaking of which, what’s with all the gratuitous sex in this book? I usually don’t mind explicit scenes, but here they felt excessive and repetitive to the point that I started skimming them. We don’t need to read about the same characters having the same dysfunctional sex over and over again to understand they’re messy and tortured—we got the point the first time around. It almost feels like the author chose to throw in some random smut to compensate for the slow, uneventful plot; unfortunately, I found the romance (and the characters’ relationships in general) just as dry as the plot itself. The two main leads had no chemistry whatsoever and I simply couldn’t figure out what they saw in each other besides physical attraction.
The one thing that managed to hold my interest was the mythology. I love folklore and mysticism and enjoyed reading about this re-interpretation of Ashkenazi religious traditions. However, the lore alone wasn’t enough for me to push through the book.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Canada for this e-ARC....more
Did I know that reading this right after Vita Nostra was a mistake? Yes. But sometimes you got to succumb to the hype and pick up the hot newDNF at 40%
Did I know that reading this right after Vita Nostra was a mistake? Yes. But sometimes you got to succumb to the hype and pick up the hot new release that everyone is talking about. Unfortunately, A Deadly Education turned out to be a rather painful reading experience for me. I very rarely do not finish books, but this one was genuinely boring me to tears. I suspect that, had it been written by anyone other than Naomi Novik (a bestselling, award-winning author with a large fanbase), no major publisher would have put it out without a few additional rounds of editing. This book is plagued by so many glaring structural, tonal, and conceptual problems that I’m truly baffled by the raving reviews it has received.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the main issues I found:
1. Is this Harry Potter fanfiction? The answer is, of course, yes. It’s no secret that Scholomance is based on a Draco/Harry fic by the same name that Novik posted on her AO3 account a few years back. This isn’t the first time this author has filed the serial numbers off of her fanfic, either; her Temeraire saga famously started off as a Master and Commander spin off. I’m not here to pass judgement on the legitimacy of this practice; however, I think there’s something to be said about an author who built herself an audience writing gay fanfiction, only to consistently straightwash it before publication. The real problem, though, is how painfully derivative this book feels. We have a bunch of teenagers trying to survive a dangerous magic school in England, a chosen one worshiped by the entire student body, an evil-but-not-really love interest who everyone believes is a dark magician, half-bloods, muggles... sorry, I meant mundanes. In general, I had an overwhelming sense of reading recycled material. This felt like jumping back in time to the mid-2000s, when every fantasy author was coming up with their own thinly veiled version of Hogwarts.
2. Exposition over plot. I saw a reviewer say that this book reminded them of a furniture assembly manual, and I’ll have to agree. The already threadbare plot is bogged down by endless exposition and tedious monologues where El lectures the reader on every world building detail. The whole thing reads like an AU fanfiction written by someone who was so proud of their world that they treated every other aspect of the story like an afterthought. Fanfic readers, of course, are generally okay with a lackluster plot if it means they get to see more of their favorite characters; I, on the other hand, couldn't care less about El and Orion, and Novik does very little to change my mind. They’re tropey, one-note protagonists with nothing deep or unique about them.
3. Why is this sold as adult? As someone who often complains about female authors being shelved as young adult even when they write adult fiction, I hate to say what I’m about to say, but: A Deadly Education should have been YA. This is a very standard, paint-by-numbers fantasy that ticks all the category’s boxes: teenage protagonist, high school setting, quirky and “relatable” first person narrator, central romance. For real, the characters spend entire pages discussing cafeteria seating arrangements and who’s dating who in the school. Given how heavily the marketing campaign leaned on the dark academia aspect of the book, I went in expecting something along the lines of Ninth House or Vita Nostra; instead, what I got was closer to Shadowhunters by way of Rainbow Rowell. Perhaps the most glaringly juvenile element is the first-person, present-tense narration that constantly breaks the fourth wall to address the reader. Maybe it’s me, but this took me completely out of the story and broke my suspension of disbelief. If we’re supposed to experience the events of the book at the same time as El, why does she sound like she’s telling the story to an audience? Who is she talking to?
4. Real-world cultures aren’t fantasy. Did you know that Scholomance is actually a black magic school in Romanian folklore? Or that mana is a supernatural force in traditional Polynesian religion? Yeah, neither did I. Novik picks and chooses different elements from non-Western cultures, incorporating them into her world without referencing their original context; but treating real-world cultures like fantasy tropes can have some unfortunate implications, particularly when things like religion and language are involved. This is especially true when it comes to the book’s magic system. We’re told right off the bat that the two most powerful languages in this world are English and Mandarin; children are encouraged to learn them from a young age, and El is annoyed that her mother insisted on teaching her Marathi (her father’s native tongue) rather than Hindi or Mandarin. The book constantly pushes the idea that minority languages are inherently less valuable than majority ones, without ever attempting to unpack the reasons why those languages became so widely spoken in the first place. No consideration is given to the colonialist and imperialist roots of language oppression; in Novik’s universe, real-world discrimination simply doesn’t exist. Why, then, set the story in modern day England instead of a secondary world? I can’t wrap my head around this....more
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