You might not have read anything by Naomi Novik. If this is the case, you should probably stop reading this review and instead go read something by Naomi Novik. My favorite is Spinning Silver; however, for the purposes of this review, maybe you should start with The Last Graduate.
Novik is perhaps uniquely prolific as an author of both original works (mostly novels, mostly some kind of fantasy) and 'transformative works'...which we usually just call fanfic. There isn't money in fanfic, the readership is often microscopic, and only a very limited kind of prestige is possible--and yet people love it. They love writing transformative works, and they love reading them. There's a kind of purity of entertainment factor in fanfic, where no real reward is possible for your work except the reward of someone reading what you wrote, and maybe thanking you for it. Creating transformative works is a little bit about the technical craft (the quality does, after all, vary dramatically), and a lot about the community, a lot about the passion. Passion for the source material is what drives us to rewrite, to extend, to fix, to re-think, to laugh (sometimes with, but sometimes at...). One could say, if one were given to writing self-important reviews of podcasts (does one seem given to writing self-important reviews, one occasionally wonders?), that fanfic is about love.
Novik brings all of the best things about transformative works to the table in the Scholomance series. There's all of the passion, all of the questioning, all of the community...and there's also a certain amount of anger. Anger at the world--which, despite all the wizard stuff, is really just our world--for being so stupid and unfair. Anger at other people for being blind to these problems. Anger at your own limitations, or even at the limitations your own sense of morality places on you. What I love about the Scholomance books is the way that El works through her anger, and not around it. Whether this turns her into a scary dark sorceress--well, you'll have to read the books.
Emily & Megan are pretty much the perfect team to discuss the Scholomance series. Megan is, in fact, so much the perfect reader that you're going to be semi-spoiled by her incredibly genre-savvy predictions; you might not want to read along too fast if you want to be surprised by the book's plot twists. But they really get these books; they do a great job of analyzing what's satisfying about them and what could have been better (and while the books are very fun, they're also not flawless). They understand the world, and they understand the passion.
I also find them pretty funny.
Five-star podcast. No notes. Unless you count a review as a note, in which case, well, yeah, I see how this might count as some notes....
