A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Published 2020 · 336 pages · 115,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Coming-of-Age, Fantasy
How hard is A Deadly Education to read?
A Deadly Education scores 41 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Novik's accessible prose with magical terminology and El's distinctive, digressive voice.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Long, breathless sentences reflecting El's anxious narration. Parenthetical asides and run-on explanations.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Privilege, resource distribution, and institutional violence as structural critiques embedded in a survival narrative.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- The Scholomance's rules, magical ecosystem, enclave politics, and El's backstory. Dense world-building.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- El's first-person narration is defensive and digressive. She hides her feelings from the reader as from herself.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- The school as zero-sum society. El's destructive power as marginalization. Enclaves as privilege structures.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- El's self-deprecating, angry narration creates ironic distance. She describes herself in the worst possible terms.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- First of a trilogy. Immediate dangers are resolved, but the Scholomance's larger problems and El's destiny remain.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Single-POV first-person narration in a single location. The structure is the school year.
How A Deadly Education is regarded
A Deadly Education holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.