Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Lots of Escaping Reality Books

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)
The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3)

 I listened to a series about wizards and witches being trained at a magical school. Are you thinking of Harry Potter? A trilogy of books, A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, is about Scholomance, a school for gifted magical children. Novik has a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in Computer Science. Her well-developed, thoughtful, and meticulously crafted story shows both at work. She gives many detailed explanations of how magic works. The protagonist, El (short for Galadriel), fights to survive deadly evil beings, Malefacaria, who seek to devour magical children and their Mana, the power to do magic. The first book starts slowly because of the necessary world-building, but Novik is a terrific storyteller, and the books are worth the effort. I wouldn't recommend them for ten-year-olds. It gets tense and gruesome, and it's not a cuddly story of friendship, but more of a loser loner fighting against everyone. At least at first, but like Harry Potter, it does revolve around the themes of connection and doing the right thing. 
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Jameela Green Ruins Everything

  Jameela Green Ruins Everything by Zarqa Nawaz is zany and painful. Jameela Green is a Muslim American woman who wants her memoir to be a best-seller, and she bargains with God asking that it happen. The result is a dark screwball comedy of a book that is insightful and, for me, educational about life for Muslims in America and US interactions with Muslim countries. Nawaz creates good guys and bad guys of every type--American, Syrian, male, female, Iraqi, British, terrorist, and CIA. The book explores, in several threads, the mother/daughter relationship. It also explores why people might choose destructive paths. I liked the book. It was thought-provoking and hilarious

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