5/5. So I know the Scholomance books about grimdark-monsters-will-eat-you-magical-boarding-school aren't everyone's cup of tea, and if you didn't like A Deadly Education I dare say you won't like this one either, but wow it is like The Last Graduate was made to laser-focus target my id, in fact way more deeply than Education, which was already pretty good at targeting my id.

Oh, well, to start with, there are certainly a number of things about Graduate that are basically also what I liked about Education, especially at the beginning:

-Grimdark. I actually do enjoy grimdark as a thing, okay, but what I don't enjoy about it is the nihilism, and both A Deadly Education and Graduate reject that utterly -- but more later on that. (Until then, I will say that while Education was reasonably centered in grimdark, Graduate is all about bringing light into the grimdark, which YEAH.)

-Boarding-school -- as others have remarked, to be honest the Scholomance books have quite a bit less boarding-school vibe than one might expect from a one-line description, because the grimdark sort of takes over, but it turns out that a lot of what I like about boarding-school books is:

-Competency kink. It's baked into the premise of these books -- you have to be super competent or else mals are going to eat you. But I really enjoy reading about characters who are really really good at making their magical lutes or casting spells of destruction or whatever, and the details of their doing it.

-Fandomesque Harry Potter critique. Actually that was much more muted in this book than the last one (and there was very little YA-critique in the way I felt like Education was really having a go at YA tropes/cliches, especially grimdark YA) because Novik had her fun in the last book and was interested in bigger things, but still, there's a way in which this particular book is very much an answer to the Harry Potter House System and how the division between them became more and more problematic as the books went on.

-A focus on El learning how to deal with having friends and deepening her friendships and alliances, and I am always there for that kind of thing

So that's how the book starts. And I was unsure how Novik was going to sustain this for an entire book. Like, I'm not opposed to reading about grimdark competency-kink friendship-building Harry-Potter-critiquing for an entire book, but that seemed like -- I don't know -- not quite ambitious enough for what the first book promised?

...And then we got the rest of the book. I guess the least spoilerific way I can talk about it is -- we already knew the theme of Novik's recent books is working with rather than against, and this one doesn't break that streak. And raised to the emotional pitch of eucatastrophe; I had extremely wet eyes through that entire last chapter.

( Spoilers. Tried to keep them as implicit as possible, but still spoilers. )

A couple of other assorted things, including slight nitpicks:

-ase pointed out that the numbers really don't work out in Deadly Education -- I feel rather silly for not noticing it myself: if substantially more than half your kids are being killed off, then unless everyone was having a bunch of kids (and this doesn't seem to be a thing everyone is doing) you wouldn't have any wizards left by this time. Unfortunately there are additional concrete numbers in this book and they keep not making any sense. Oh well.

-First Novik published book (that I know of) where there are actual canon relationships that aren't M/F, whee! (ETA: But because Novik book, relatively minor characters, one of whom was so minor that it actually took me a minute to remember that character's gender.) Though I felt like the stirring speech that went with the second one was a little... too much, a little too "look at me with my awesome vegetables" that I feel like generally speaking Novik is too good a writer to do, instead integrating much more seamlessly: e.g. how she makes the Scholomance as a global entity (unlike the Harry Potter world, I must say), complete with inequities, is integrated into the worldbuilding and in my opinion done really well.

-Also, it does end on a cliffhanger. I knew this going in, and I was worried about what the cliffhanger would be, and in particular I worried it meant the book arc would get aborted. I shouldn't have; the arc works. I mean, it is a giant cliffhanger, but it doesn't mess with the meaning of the book, go Novik.

-Also also, I am sooooo annoyed that I read this days after Yuletide nomination closed. I would SO have nominated Worldbuilding for it. I really REALLY want to know more about the Scholomance now, and also more about what is going on with all those enclave kids. I guess there's always next year. (ETA 10-9: YESSSSSSS)

This may be the best second book of a trilogy I've ever read (except, of course, Purgatorio ;) ). I mean, IDK, it's possible I'm totally forgetting something :) But at least it's the first time in a long time that I didn't think the second book in a trilogy was the weakest link; I think this one is better than Education, not because Education was flawed, but because Graduate built on Education to become something greater than one book could be alone. We'll see in a year, I guess, whether the second book is the strongest because the third book is the weakest link, or whether she'll be able to pull off something to top this. (Honestly the third book seems like it would be incredibly difficult to write, given how she's constrained herself in this book... but then again I wouldn't have thought she could make this one work, and she totally did.)

(ETA: SPOILERS fair game in comments!)