October 3, 2024

This is a Good Book Thursday, October 3, 2024

This week I read Naomi Novik’s Scholomance Trilogy again. (I’m a big Novik fan.) Originally, I loved the first book, really liked the second which was much more complex, and got so lost in the third one that I sort of skimmed until I got to the end. This time I loved the first book, thought the second was terrific, and actually gave the third one a fair read. It’s still the one I like the least, but it was a lot better this time around, and it made me think about trilogies in particular, the idea that you can’t just keep repeating the same story, you have to arc a trilogy like a novel. So the first Scholomance was about El, a loaner with a terrible future who forms alliances, and it was very personal and so much fun to read (I love an angry heroine). The second one was about El again, and she had support now, but she was still fighting prejudice and still trying to do the right thing within the confines of her murderous school, and it was still fun. But she graduates at the end of that one, so the third one takes place in the big wide world with El at the height of her powers; she can pretty much do anything at this point. So a new setting, new problems, new antagonists . . . I think it was just too different from the first two when I first read it. And it was much more complex, and that made it difficult, too. Mostly, I think, I just missed the confined setting of the school, within which Novik had built a fabulous but self-contained world.

Anyway it made me think a lot about trilogies which is good because I’m finishing up one with Bob now, and we’ll be starting a new one after this. I like trilogies, we can do so much more with character over three books. I just have to think about them more.

So what did you read this week?