(Spoilers for the previous Scholomance books)

At the end of The Last Graduate, El and her allies carried out a plan to save all of the Scholomance’s students, both current and future. They escaped with their lives, all but one – Orion shoving El through a portal to safety and turning to face the world’s largest maw-mouth alone. The Golden Enclaves opens with El struggling to process her loss. Her grief soon begets a plan to upend the centuries-old foundations of the magical world.

Partway though Last Graduate, I started reading it as an economic metaphor, with mana being a form of capital. Though Novik never makes the connection explicitly in the text, there’s too much in Golden Enclaves for me to read it any other way. Within the lens of a YA magical world, Novik pulls in topics as big as wealth inequality, oppressive systems compounding across generations, and the dilemma of making choices as an individual with little power in a horrific world, along with things as specific as “industry standard” NDAs. I said last winter and I say again, I read this series as “a critique of mixing semi-anarchy & capital-L-Libertarian-capitalism with insufficient socialism” – and I love it for that.

But even though massive themes of the world’s inequalities permeate The Golden Enclaves, it remains a plot-forward book with strong character voices. I blew through the book quickly, needing to know what was going to happen next and how El was going to make it out of the frying pan (then out of the fire, then out the trash compactor…). I’ve been a fan of Novik’s writing since reading the first Temeraire book in 2009, and it’s as strong as ever here.

On representation – this series features characters from around the world, starting with a Welsh-Indian narrator and building a cast with diverse ethnic backgrounds, and Golden Enclaves continues. In addition to the first two books’ minor characters from historically marginalized genders & sexualities, book 3 features a bi/pan main character as well.

All told, Golden Enclaves is a great book and I highly recommend it. It certainly benefits if you’ve read the first two books, but if you’re feeling like jumping in here I think that would be possible – there’s enough context given that it’s understandable, without feeling like you’re having to wade through exposition.

The Golden Enclaves is available for purchase and might be held by your local library. You can find it in print and support a local bookstore via IndieBound, or as an ebook at Kobo (or presumably most other ebook distributors).