This is by far my favorite of Novik's books, although I did also like Uprooted and Spinning Silver. There's definitely been a progression; I think that the Scholomance books, in addition to honestly hitting my id more squarely than the others, are also better written than her other books, and SS was better written than Uprooted -- just craftwise I can see that each book fits together better than previous ones, with less flab and more... everything.

LOLOLOL YES to the satire on the Chosen One! It's interesting, a few people I'm DW friends with read it and didn't like it, and I think in most if not all cases they didn't ping on it as a major element (whereas it made the whole book hilarious to me). But also looooved El's female friendships, yes!

It's a huge cliffhanger and I'm definitely like "what do you mean I have to WAIT to read the next book??" but as I said in the post, it's not a cliffhanger that messes with this book's arc. (Which I should have trusted Novik not to do.)

We haven't got the tag set yet, but spreadsheet says someone nommed El, Orion, Aadhya, and Liu, which is great and I love them all, except that I don't actually particularly want fic with them right at this second, I want worldbuilding fic, lol! :D But one never knows about the people who don't show up on the spreadsheet which a lot of people don't, maybe someone else nommed worldbuilding :D