IN SHORT: This fantastic conclusion to the Magic Book Series the Scholomance brings so much together but has some disturbing elements.

REVIEW

At the end of The Last Graduate, powerful witch El has just managed to protect and evacuate all of the students of magical school the Scholomance at the end of the school year. After a few years of being a loner, she had managed to not only make some friends but then cooperate with them and a bunch of others to plan how to pull off this unheard-of feat.

And then her boyfriend, Orion, who thrived off of being a hero and killing magical monsters, had to be a hero again and stay put inside, trapped by a maw-mouth, after pushing El through the door to the outside world.

Now El is back home with her mom, a hippie-style famous healer, at their commune in Wales. And she’s absolutely heartbroken about Orion. She tries in vain to figure out how to rescue him, but then bigger problems make themselves known. Someone is destroying enclaves, places Wizards have built in big cities around the world that are mostly safe from maleficaria. Most other wizards want to be able to join the enclaves, but it takes years of work, some luck, extraordinary talent, and/or connections to even get a chance. El has been wanting to help create smaller enclaves to allow more wizards the opportunity that these elitist wizards have had for centuries. The sutras she miraculously found in the Scholomance are her instruction manual for making this dream happen.

First, though, friends ask her to help with the existing enclaves. They’re being invaded by maw-mouths and threatened with destruction, and no one knows why. What’s known, though, is that wizards will lose their homes, if not their lives, and an enclave war is likely imminent.

As El goes from enclave to enclave, she learns some terrible truths, worse than she had ever imagined. And she has to make some impossible choices.

The Golden Enclaves is a great conclusion to the Scholomance series. It still has all the cleverness of the previous books, and the best component is still El. She’s a cynical teenager who’s grudgingly coming to accept love and friendship after years of rejection. She’s smart and ridiculously talented and wants to do right by the world, despite (or because of?) a prophesy that she’s going to wreak destruction. She’s determined to do everything she can to prevent utter chaos and to protect her fellow wizards.

This book is darker than the previous two. It takes place in the outside world, rather than inside the school, even though the Scholomance was dangerous. It involves adult wizards who have made evil choices and justify them by claiming they are for “the greater good.” El has to figure out how to deal with the ramifications of those choices and decide if that reasoning is valid and the only option to protect people. The story deals quite a bit with this moral dilemma.

So many threads of the plot that I didn’t even realize were crucial in the past two books come together here to conclude a story that was bigger than I anticipated. It’s a fantastic magic book series with so much to enjoy and appreciate. But it does get dark (I found myself pretty disturbed by one vital but upsetting part of the plot). It’s not unlike how Harry Potter starts out lighter and more appropriate for younger readers but gradually gets darker; those readers often do better waiting until they’re older to finish the series.

RATING

Rated: High. Profanity includes 13 uses of strong language, about 15 instances of moderate profanity, about a dozen uses of mild language, and about 5 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are about 25 uses of the British (bl-) curse word. Sexual content includes three sex scenes, that are mostly low on detail. One is between the main character and her boyfriend and two are between her and a girl. Those are described as a great way to reduce a lot of stress, basically. Violence involves a fair amount of fighting (or references to fighting) horrible magical creatures. There are some pretty disturbing descriptions of how one nasty magical creature is created (by wizards), involving killing a human being in a long, drawn-out way. It’s a crux of the plot. The main character is horrified, and readers are as well.

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