The Last Graduate

The Last Graduate is the second volume in Novik’s Scholomance trilogy. The first book in the series, A Deadly Education, takes place during El’s junior year at the Scholomance. During that year, El collaborates with Orion and the graduating seniors to clean the graduation hall of the Scholomance. However, the repercussions of cleaning the hall only become clear in The Last Graduate. When El discovers that the hall is empty, she commits to her audacious plan to save everyone in the school rather than merely saving herself and those in her alliance.

Another important concept from the first novel is the continued influence of the prophecy of El’s paternal grandmother. The prophecy states that El will become a Dark Sorceress who will destroy the enclaves. El must live with the burden of that prophecy; at the start of The Last Graduate, she still refuses to rely fully upon her power because it is inherently dark and because she fears the possibility of succumbing to that darkness. Her fear of an ominous destiny leads her to conceal her powers, a choice that causes conflict with suspicious enclavers. That conflict is responsible for most of the tension in middle chapters of The Last Graduate.

Another important aspect of the first novel in the series involves El’s increased efforts to form connections with other students. The culmination of those efforts occurs in A Deadly Education, when El establishes a graduation alliance with Aadhya and Liu. This alliance also proves to be crucial to El’s plans in The Last Graduate, since the alliance becomes an outright friendship that gives El the confidence to reach out to others and devise her audacious plan to save everyone in the school. Likewise, El’s friendship with Orion, which begins in A Deadly Education, eventually blossoms into a full-blown romance during the events of The Last Graduate.

The two novels are also connected thematically. Both A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate focus on power—particularly its influence on the ethics of survival tactics. The two novels also focus on the impact of loneliness and isolation as the students of the Scholomance come of age without the stabilizing presence of adults. In the first volume, El immediately understands that members of enclaves (both inside and beyond the Scholomance) have privileges that will help them to survive. El’s effort to clean the graduation hall in A Deadly Education and her effort to save everyone in The Last Graduate are both important aspects of her project to ensure that enclaver students and independent students have equal access to rights and privileges. One challenge for El is to further develop her leadership skills, which are only hinted at in A Deadly Education. In the absence of adult mentors to help her learn how best to lead, El relies on friends and rivals alike in order to transform into a decisive leader by the end of The Last Graduate. In this way, the second volume allows Novik to build on the plot, character motivation, conflict, and themes of the first novel.