cahn

So I read The Golden Enclaves and Nona the Ninth in September and October, respectively, and I kept meaning to post how much I loved both of them and here we are in November, so... okay, I'm not going to make the long posts I was hoping to make about them, but at least I will post about them!

The Golden Enclaves I read in a couple of days after it came out (because I wanted to know whom I should nominate for Yuletide...). If you liked the other two Scholomance books you will probably like this one too! (And if you didn't, you... probably won't?) I absolutely adored it, I adore this whole series.

Spoilers!

-okay I thought the whole El/Liesel and El/Liesel/Alfie thing was totally delicious

-I was totally bowled over by El killing the maw-mouths meaning she was destroying the enclaves, and partially that was because ALL THE CLUES WERE THERE IN PLAIN SIGHT and I just didn't see it coming at all, and also partially because El got it a page before I did, and I sat there and was like "...how does she know Dubai's going to be hit? What do you mean she's going to wait a half hour -- Oh. Oh. OH. OH CRAP."

-the thing I was probably most moved by was Deepthi, and how she had actually meant nothing but good for El this whole time but had had to throw her out anyway, and also how she sent her favorite grandson to his death -- which El actually wonders about in Graduate -- and how El's grandfather says he has to leave because this is too much, even if he doesn't actually, and how Deepthi says he would have jumped WITH EL and even that would have been better than the future she saw could have happened

-the characters I was most fascinated by were Olivia Rhys-Lake and Li Shanfeng, because they were the ones who did the horrible realpolitik calculations. They were the ones who, with their eyes wide open, did terrible, awful things -- for what they thought was the greater good. For what even might have been the greater good, sometimes? It gets glossed over a bit, but it's clearly a thing that El was able not to have to make hard unethical decisions because Ophelia and Shanfeng (and Deepthi!) did. Li Shanfeng is especially fascinating to me because he tried so hard to do the right thing, but sometimes all his choices were bad, and he owned that. I loved him in his brief scene and would have loved a ton more!

-having said all that, I do think the pacing was a bit off -- there was a lot of "where in the world is El Sandiego," so to speak, as they kept jet-setting everywhere, and we could have had a LOT more of Gwen, and poor Chloe just got... dropped entirely?? But Novik's writing is so compelling that I didn't really care in the moment while reading it (except about poor Chloe, where I kept expecting her being out of communication with everyone to be a plot point, but no, she just got forgotten).

Nona the Ninth I am very pleased to say that I obtained from

ase in an airport a couple thousands of miles from where either of us lives, because we had ascertained that we were going to be at that same airport at approximately the same time and that we should say hi for about ten minutes before we both had to be elsewhere, and also that I should read Nona :) It was a quite nice ten minutes!

I loved Nona, both the book and especially the character. I also did not reread GtN or HtN before reading it, so I was extraordinarily confused throughout the entire book, to the extent that I completely misunderstood a lot of what was going on, including who Nona was, until

ase set me straight. (Thank you! :D ) I loved the found-family/friend-groups, I loved

spoilers for NtN

Cam and Pal (although I'm not sure what I think of Paul yet), I loved that John is so entirely terrible, and all the cow jokes were just wholly terrible and incredibly hilarious.

SPOILERS for Golden Enclaves in the comments! (None for Nona, yet.)