A Deadly Education

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Soul Eater”

Galadriel (El) explains that she decided Orion Lake needed to die after the second time he saved her life. Orion has a habit of rescuing or saving the lives of the students at school, which has earned him the affection and gratitude of the other students, but El resents it because it makes her look as though she needs saving. She is powerful in her own right and does not want to appear to be someone who needs his help.

Orion chases a soul-eater into El’s room and kills it. El responds with a sarcastic expression of thanks, and then she kicks him out of her room. Cleaning up after the dead soul-eater is frustrating and tedious because the magical void that provides for the students consistently gives her spells and magic that tends towards dark magic. This is because of El’s natural magical affinity for death and destruction. Her mother is the opposite: a sensitive, empathetic person with an affinity for helping and healing. El gets angry and uses one of her mother’s meditative crystals to calm down. When she asks again for a spell, the void gives her a book of household spells in Old English, which El does not speak or read particularly well.

El explains that spells require energy to use. This energy can be sourced in two ways: the first is “mana,” which is earned through exertion and can be stored in “power-sinks”; the second is “malia,” which is pulled from the lifeforce of the beings around you. For example, a simple spell might kill a colony of ants nearby; a more complex spell may kill the nearest human being. El’s mother refuses to use malia, though many people consider it harmless cheating. El explains that though you can use malia for small tasks without any negative consequences, larger and more destructive tasks require the life force “from things complicated enough to have feelings about it and resist you. Then the power gets tainted and you’re getting psychically clawed as you try and yank away their mana, and often enough they win” (8). Students at the school who use malia undergo physical changes, such as all-white eyes, black nails, or the smell of death and rotting. El has noticed these signs in two students: Liu and Jack. In one noteworthy year in the school’s history, only 12 students survived graduation, and all of them had gone dark. The families realized quickly that they’d killed the other students. The dark students, called “maleficers” were quickly hunted down and killed.

At the time of the soul-eater attack, graduation is only a few weeks away. The magical school is physically preparing to rotate and relocate its floors and sections to lower the graduating class down to the bottom level. El reflects on Liu’s progress as a maleficer; she suspects that Liu used much of her incoming luggage weight allowance to bring in a bunch of hamsters and has been steadily sacrificing them on a planned schedule. Liu is an “enclave” student, which means that her family is part of an official community of witches that shares power and protects each other. The world is extremely dangerous for witches; many independent witches die on their own, so most people are desperate to get a spot in an enclave to help ensure their survival. Liu is from an enclave, so El suspects she’s only using malia temporarily to survive the school.

The school year itself is very dangerous, as there are no teachers or guardians to protect the students. Over the course of four years, many students die in attacks from some of the creatures and monsters (mals) that lurk in the building looking for food. Those who do survive their four-year program still have to face graduation, which means they must cross an enormous room full of monsters that are awaiting their yearly meal. El’s own father died in graduation; her pregnant mother made it out alive. After El was born, her mother found her late father’s family and connected with them. They were all very excited, but almost immediately upon arrival, El’s paternal grandmother had a “visionary fit” and claimed that El “was a burdened soul and would bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world if not stopped” (14). El’s grandfather and uncles attempted to kill her then, despite her being a baby, but El’s mother stopped them. This reaction has become a familiar one for El. Many people meet her and are uneasy or fear her immediately.

El lived with her mother in a spiritual commune before coming to school, but despite how much she longs to return, she knows that her “negativity of spirit” renders her unwelcome in the commune long-term. Her only hope is to get a spot in an enclave before graduation. Even though people don’t usually like her or want to be her friend, she hopes that her massive power and ability to handle large, terrifying creatures may be enough to secure her a position. However, El knows that this depends on her reputation in school; if she is seen as someone who needs to be saved and protected by Orion, then she is not likely to find a spot in an enclave.

El does physical exercise to store mana in her power-sink crystals, cleans up the mess in her room, and then goes to dinner. She wants to shower, but showering alone is very dangerous, so she skips it. On the way to dinner, Liu asks El what happened. El explains sarcastically that their “glorious savior” Orion chased a soul-eater into her room and then made a mess killing it (20). This is interesting enough that it earns her a place to sit at dinner. As with everything at the school, sitting alone in the dining hall is dangerous. El describes the “rescue” with bitter dismissal, but the other students are still enthralled by Orion’s daring.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Mimics”

After dinner, El announces that she needs to go to the “shop” to fix the hole Orion had blasted in her door. Jack offers, but El stares him down because she knows he might kill her if they were alone together, and he changes his mind. Aadhya asks what El will give in exchange for backup. Orion, who is sitting at the next table, says that he will go with her. The Scholomance “isn’t precisely a real place” and is built into the “void,” which no one truly understands and cannot be explained (25). The blueprints to the building are posted so the students’ belief in them will reinforce the building’s continued existence and functioning. El explains that the Scholomance is “persuadable,” which means it can adjust in physical form to the expectations of its residents. This might mean it takes less time to get somewhere if several people are going in a hurry, but it might also mean if you’re doing something out of the routine, the staircases might take you somewhere unexpected.

El and Orion set off, but as soon as they’re out of sight, El turns on Orion and asks, “What part of leave me alone didn’t you understand?” (26). Orion is confused and stops walking. El asks if he’s “actively trying to meet new and exciting mals?” but Orion tells her the mals have never sought him out. El asks if Orion just likes fighting the mals, and Orion defensively asks if she doesn’t enjoy practicing her own affinity. El tells him, “My affinity is laying waste to multitudes, so I haven’t had much opportunity to try the experience” (28).

El realizes that Orion has a “power-sharing” arrangement with the other students from the New York enclave, which means they all carry objects that allow them to draw on each other’s power. This power sharing means none of the students must spend a lot of time exercising to build mana. Orion is somehow able to pull mana from the mals he kills, so he feeds the power sharing in that way.

As they approach the shop level, Orion takes the lead. It is El’s habit to carefully check every space for mals before she enters it, but Orion just walks in casually. The shop is rarely used after hours, so it can be very dangerous to go there. El uses Orion’s mal-repulsive qualities to help her obtain supplies she can use for her own projects as well as extras she can use in trade with other students. As they grab tools, they’re attacked by mimics that had disguised themselves as chairs scattered around the room. The mimics all charge for El, so she uses one of her new cleaning spells to make the floor slippery and runs away. Orion catches up with her, having grabbed the tools she’d hoped for.

They stop by Aadhya’s room to trade for some wire and let her know that El has a drill in case Aadhya can broker any further trades. They return to El’s room, where El painstakingly repairs the door with the scrap metal and wire. Orion asks why she doesn’t “Just use the mending charm?” (34). El tells him she is using it. The “excessively nitpicky hand work” has allowed her to store enough mana in her crystal that she can pull from it to execute the mending charm. Astonished, Orion asks if she’s “strict mana?” (34). He asks why she doesn’t “pull from—the air, or the furniture—everyone’s got holes in their bedposts—” and El explains that if she tries to pull energy from her surroundings, it won’t come from inanimate objects. To demonstrate, she mentally grabs ahold of his life force and gives it a hard yank. This is difficult for most wizards, but it comes easily to El, who thinks she could have drained him and everyone on his power-sharing network without much effort.

Orion is confused and alarmed, but El tells him that he’d better go back to his room before curfew. For some reason, having two kids in one room after curfew turns you into a “horrible magnet” for the mals. Orion abruptly asks what happened to another student, Luisa, who had died that year. El says it wasn’t her, and that there are several practicing maleficers in the school. Orion tries to retort but becomes flustered when El is cold and short with him. She kicks him out of her room and slams the newly repaired door closed.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Maleficer”

El does sit-ups to build the mana to cast a protective barrier over her bed that night. The next morning, Aadhya gets El for “showers and breakfast company,” which is unusually nice (40); El knows that her drill is a valuable resource but not enough to support this level of engagement. Soon, she realizes that Aadhya is looking for gossip about El and Orion, who the students now believe may be dating. El denies the trip to the shop was a date and quickly works out that Aadhya is being friendly to her to get an ‘in’ with Orion.

Aadhya saves them a table in the dining hall while El and Orion get food. Orion kills a blood-clinger hiding beneath a tray of scrambled eggs and is disgruntled when El criticizes him for it. She tells him, “If I was still stupid enough at the tail end of junior year to go for a tray full of freshly cooked scrambled eggs without checking the perimeter, not even your undivided attention would get me out of this school alive” (42). Back at the table, Aadhya asks if the egg creature was a clinger because one of them had attacked a senior before they’d arrived. The senior dies from the attack before the juniors are released from the dining hall.

El is taking five languages because there are only three academic tracks at the school: incantations, alchemy, and artifice. Incantations is the only track that you can practice without having to risk trips to the lab or the shop, so many people choose it. Only those with an affinity for alchemy or artifice pursue those tracks because it plays to their strengths, and they don’t have much competition. Aadhya is one of these people and El reflects that Aadhya has good odds for getting into the New York enclave or, if not, New Orleans or Atlanta. El knows that the New York enclave isn’t likely for her, “unless [she] pulled off something really amazing, and probably not at all given [she] was with increasing passion contemplating the murder of their darling star,” but she has hope for some of the European enclaves (45). She knows she needs to come out of the school with a “substantial reputation and a substantial spell-list” to have a chance (45).

The problem with building a spell list is that the void tends to give her spells for death and destruction, and when she tries to write her own, they end up being for things like setting off a super volcano. Since she cannot write her own spells, languages are key to El’s success. A broader linguistic knowledge also allows for more trading with other students. Mandarin and English are the two major languages. El also speaks Marathi thanks to her mother’s hope it would give El a connection to her father. El is studying Sanskrit, Latin, German, and Middle and Old English. She did French and Spanish the year before and knows Hindi.

Orion appears to be following El to class, but when she calls him on it, he says he’s going to the supply room. The students El usually walks with ask if they can go with him, so the whole group heads to the supply room for paper, ink, and other normal supplies. Orion walks them back to class; El asks what he’s doing and if he’s really trying to go out with her, but he denies this. She asks if he thinks she’s a maleficer and is trying to keep an eye on her in case he needs to kill her, which he cannot deny. Seething, El stalks away and into class.

There are no teachers at the Scholomance, so language classes consist of reading textbooks and working on worksheets “while disembodied voices whisper to you in whatever language you’re studying that day” (52). “Usually,” El notes, “they tell me horrible gory stories or describe my death in loving detail” (52). That day, the voice “tenderly recited an epic alliterative poem all about how Orion Lake, ‘hero of the shadowed halls,’ was going to murder me in my sleep” (52).

El realizes Orion’s attentions are probably continuing because of Luisa—El had lied to him about what she knew, so he likely suspects she had killed the girl. She thinks Orion cares more about what happened to Luisa than she’d realized. She also realizes that Orion’s company has improved her social status, so she plays into it by telling Aadhya that Orion walked her to class. El continues to take advantage, and Orion cooperates by seeking her out in every class they share.

In lab class, the school gives El the task of creating a jet of super-hot plasma. She deliberately edges her experiment close to Orion’s work so the flame will destroy the things he was working on. It makes El feel much better, as does being invited to dinner by another student, Nkoyo. El agrees on the condition that she can bring Liu; she knows the Orion glow will wear off, so she wants to use the temporary sheen to strengthen her alliance with other students on the fringes.

Liu tells El that Orion was asking questions about Luisa in class earlier. El knows that this will make Jack, who she suspects actually killed Luisa, angry. She spends the time before dinner exercising to fill more of her power-sink crystals. Her plan is to accrue as much stored mana as possible, and then use a few of them to build her reputation before the end of the term so she can get into a solid graduation alliance in senior year.

At dinner, El is sure to be nice to Orion, even offering him a pudding she’d grabbed in the line. Orion is suspicious but takes it. He follows her to turn in their trays after the meal and confronts her, demanding she tell him what happened to Luisa. He’s distracted by an attacking mal, so El hurries back to her room, satisfied with the day and her plans to have breakfast with some London enclave kids in the morning. When there’s a knock on her door, she answers it thinking it will be Orion. Instead, it’s Jack, who stabs her and then closes the door behind him. Jack croons creepily at El about how much fun they could have together. There’s a part of El that wants to go dark to kill him and defend herself, but she resists. Another knock sounds on her door, which she opens with a childish “open sesame” spell (62). The door opens to reveal Orion.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

These first chapters introduce the reader to the world in which El lives, particularly the Scholomance. The reader also begins to understand El’s place in her world. Though El is a strong witch with a rare and powerful affinity, people are instinctively wary of her. El believes they sense something of the dark potential in her and that it drives them off. It is arguably because of this that El has adapted by being rude, unfriendly, and short-tempered with people.

Though many books feature protagonists for whom the social stakes are important, this novel establishes that social acceptance is a matter of life or death for El. The school itself is extremely dangerous, the graduation ceremony doubly so, and the world outside is more of the same—if, that is, you are a witch or wizard who lives outside of an enclave. For El, the assurance that “it gets better” after high school isn’t true. These four years will determine how long or short her life is, how calm or violent, how safe or dangerous. This is an interesting blurring of the conflict between self/society and self/world. Social protection is necessary for environmental survival. Even in this relatively contained world with established protections—however inadequate—El routinely stalks the outskirts of the social groups for enough shelter from the danger of being solitary. Out in the real world after graduation, she will not be able to tag along with a couple of other kids on the way to class or the lab.

These chapters also establish a remarkable and profound self versus self-conflict that El faces. The magic within her lends itself easily to massive, showy, destructive spells. She could kill all of the students in the school as easily as some could mend her broken door. The influence of her loving, empathetic, peaceful mother prevents El from giving in to her darker impulses. El is also stubborn and determined to prove her grandmother wrong about her being a danger. Because of this, she limits herself to the amount of mana she can produce by pure physical exertion and effort. This point produces dramatic irony; though her classmates suspect El is evil and destructive, the reader knows that El is constantly consciously choosing not to practice any kind of magic that could cause them harm. Jack and Liu have both given into the temptation to be maleficers, but El staunchly refuses. Even when her life is on the line, she does not tap into the dark potential within her.

These chapters also begin to establish the similar misunderstanding and tension between Orion and the other students. El notices that Orion is awkward with all the praise he receives. She sees how people perceive him as a golden boy and a glorious hero, and she notices how many of the other students will grasp for any opportunity to be close to him for their own benefit. El focuses a lot on friendships and alliances in these chapters, but she never mentions any substantial connections between Orion and any other students. In later chapters, the reader will discover that Orion is as isolated as El is, though for seemingly opposite reasons. Few people bother to get to know El because she is off-putting and seemingly dark, and while Orion is lauded and widely seen as “good,” the reader would struggle to identify anyone in these chapters who cares about him as a person. The novel brings together two ostensibly very different characters, but the reader should be attuned to their similarities—their loneliness, their isolation, and the unappreciated work they do to protect the other students.