I'm glad to have introduced you to it, then! :) (For all that I really disliked it, I did find it a story that I kept thinking about, so it's definitely doing something interesting, and I'm glad to have read it.)

Magic for Liars stacked up versus A Deadly Education, since both of them are clearly playing off the Harry Potter series.

This further intrigues me about Magic for Liars. (I enjoyed the reading experience of A Deadly Education and am looking forward to the sequel -- and am a fan of Novik overall -- but it was also the opposite of what I look for in a magic school story specifically; I really liked El and the writing, but the school itself was too terrible for me to like the book as a magic school story.)