I am glad Naomi Novik remembered how to write a novel rather than a worldbuilding essay in time for the third book. And I am glad I stuck with the series. While the first and second books explained their fictional world at length, we finally get to explore it. We literally travel around the world and really get to the bottom of it, each revelation more disturbing than the last.

El's snarky narrative voice is at its best in this book, and I found her character growth convincing, especially regarding her growing appreciation of her mother's choices.

Enough has been said about the political allegory - it is clever and terrifyingly true.

I do think this is my favorite of the 3 tbh. Appreciate the additional complexity and elements resolved and explained that I had not predicted. 

I read the scollomance series this week and after just finishing the last book i took a shower to think about it (and wash some Maw-mouth off). After the first 2 books i thought this was going to be a 5 star read for me for i had enjoyed myself a lot during the first 2 books. Reading the last book i had prepered myself to be devestated and cry my eyes out as was the setup from the sequel however, this just did not happen for me. After reading the first 2 books i thought the story was heading for an eppic end. And yes the end was pretty memorabele but also a little bit to clean for my liking. The hole story went on a return to balace and karma route. You reap what you sow in theorie. In practice that meant i think some of these caracters should have pand a higher price. So i enjoyed the series a lot but in a world of three books that has been so torturous for our students im a little disapointed by how NICE everything wraped up. 

While I was glad that this third installment took place in locations other than the one that the previous two took place in, the story felt rushed and almost like two books compressed into one. There were a lot of events jam-packed into this one book with roughly the same amount of constant exposition and world-building as the first two installments in the series. 

Overall, though, I enjoyed reading it, and I thought that everything within the story fit the lore of the first two books well and provided a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

Amazing! 
Such a great conclusion to the series! 
I really loved how all the why's and unanswered questions came together in the end. Honestly I can't think of a single plot hole that wasn't planned and filled in. 

I've raced through this series, rather like a mawmouth. I've seen in other reviews that there are issues with the writing style- lots of telling rather than showing- and I agreed. The chosen one trope is very much present so if that's not your thing, beware. But I just really enjoyed them. I got swept up in the world and El's journey. The first half was definitely more page turning. Things slowed a little in the middle but I wanted to see what happened to the characters and have the mystery of the enclave attacks solved and it all came together very satisfyingly. 

I was correct in my assessment of the first book: by blowing it up from a duology to a trilogy, I feel like there's a lot that could have been trimmed down. I don't think she could have ever put it back to a duology (unless you did two 500 page books), but the story here didn't end up being as satisfying as I wanted. 

This is mainly for the following reason:

After two books dealing with mals, and two books of El describing what it's like to take down a maw-mouth, it turns out that in order to create an Enclave, you have to sacrifice someone and turn them into a maw-mouth. So when you destroy a maw-mouth, you're destroying an Enclave somewhere else in the world.

 

The last hundred or so pages of this book, much like the last hundred or so pages of The Last Graduate, shoves everything in it. It's like the previous three hundred pages barely mattered: the entirety of the conflict happens in the final few pages.

Like, I was expecting some sort of final battle between her and Maw-Mouth Orion, but what ends up happening is she simply holds his hands and tells him that he's already dead, then it takes literally hundreds of people to stop everything from collapsing in on himself and then somehow Orion still survives?

I did really enjoy this series. I enjoyed the magic system, I enjoyed Novik's writing, and I enjoyed the characters that weren't El (which makes me wish for some sort of spin-off for Aadhya or Liu). 

Speaking of other characters, while El is busy mourning Orion's death (or at the very least, still planning on going back to the Scholomance to kill Patience and put Orion out of his misery),

she ends up banging Liesel?

This relationship seems to come out of nowhere to me - it's not even remotely hinted at in the last book, and then suddenly they're alone together and El thinks the only thing she can do to feel anything is to jump in bed together? It left a bad taste in my mouth. I guess technically, yes, she thinks Orion is dead so she's not cheating on him, but really? The kid hasn't even been dead for two weeks yet? 

All together, I enjoyed the series, and I'd definitely read it again, and try to read it while knowing what I know now about the Enclaves and how everything ends up. It's just not the story I was expecting.