An extraordinary final book in the Scholomance series! We finally get to meet the families of a lot of the characters from books 1 and 2, and see more breadth of the characters we've gotten to know. El's Mum in particular, it was brilliant to finally meet her!

The enclaves are so much more complex even than I'd anticipated. El and her fellow graduating classmates are in that awkward intermediate state of being out of school but not yet being treated as adults.

So many questions were answered in this book, and yet there are quite a few plot turns that surprised me.

Stellar ending to the trilogy. The major plot twist/reveal was so well done, I read it and suddenly EVERYTHING from the previous books made sense. Novik's characters leap off the page and into your heart. El, as someone who is told by the universe that they're destined to be evil and bring destruction to the world and they say no, I will do right and keep saying it over and over again, and her steadfast friends will stay with me for a long, long time. 

What can I say?
I’ll have to wrap most of my review in spoilers. Without spoiling anything, this book comes with some surprises that I liked, the world building is still amazing. El’s narration can be really funny:

Overall, I had a 2 year break in between book 2 and 3, that probably didn’t help. 

Good points:

The prophecy and how that turned out in the end, with the visit in Mumbai.
The whole enclave-building principle is genius
I like the “you’re already dead” principle

Less satisfying points 

The way things ended with Orion doesn’t really satisfy me.
The way things end in the well. 

What the hell, Novik did it again.

I was getting really frustrated with the first half of the book. At least three times, a character would say a couple of sentences and then El would explain a ton of inferred details to us for several pages. We had some important plot threads established, and pages were ticking by with no progress being made on them. El spent a lot of time not doing a damn thing, thinking for pages about how she didn't know what to do. There was a decent chunk spent on her wanting to accomplish something I thought was extremely stupid and didn't understand her motives - and then, at almost the 50% mark, the chess pieces were finally all on the board and the game began.

I kept saying to myself "there's no way she can solve [plot thread] in [pages left]" and then she DID over and over again until I had every answer I wanted. I actually want to go back and reread the prior two books knowing what I know now, because the reveals in this book were set up long before she started drafting it, there's just no way. It is a little bit of a spoiler to say this, so just skip over it, but watching El walk away from Omelas made me cry. In this present moment of multiple genocides and an ongoing, stubbornly-ignored pandemic, it hit me just right. "You got us all out for good, and they're trying to start a war over the bones. There's a better way. We know there's a better way. And you're trying to find it." 

I absolutely hate disliking books. It honestly causes me physical pain because I love stories and I want to love each story I come to. But every so often I pick up a book that is just too painful, frustrating, or disappointing to like — and I’m so very sad that this has been the case with The Golden Enclaves. Especially because I absolutely adored the first two books and had every expectation that I would love this one. 
Unfortunately, there are a many number of things, characters, story elements, and plot choices that I found underwhelming but what really disappointed me the most was that all of the character development we saw in El over the course of the first two books was completely undone in the first half of this one, and then not adequately built back up again by the end. This left me feeling like I didn’t know her, which is not how you want to feel at the conclusion of a series. So many of the things I had come to love about her (such as her resilience, her discipline, her strong foundation of morals, and her journey of personal growth that allowed her to let people in) either faded into the background or completely flipped. She lost her voice, her passion, her ferocity, her community, her drive. And that just wasn’t realistic, interesting, or relatable for me. Not only that, but it made me really really sad. 
The wrap up regarding the creation of enclaves and how that is tied to malia was interesting — but the conflict with Ophelia, the revelation of the prophecy, and the resolution weren’t enough to make up for the other ways I was really disappointed. 
Finally, I love Orion. And I truly believe he deserved better. Not just from the other characters, but from the author. 
Honestly, really heartbroken with this one, guys.

A brilliant ending for this trilogy. Full of twists and turns that I did not see coming. We finally learn how the Scholomance came about.
The book explores themes such as balance, destiny, friendship and fairness

This one got me.  I teared up at a couple scenes.  Getting an emotional reaction is one thing, but for that emotional to manifest physically with tears in my eyes... that another level.  And the big secret!  I was NOT expecting that.  It's not very often a story can surprise me or leave me guessing.  Half of the time, when they do, it's because the big surprise is just so far out there that it doesn't make sense.   This book does not fall into that category.  The big surprise flows so well with the story that I'm almost kicking myself for not seeing it in the earlier books!  Which means this book (and series) is an automatic 5-star rating.

Well paced, especially for an anti-hero story written in First Person.  I read the first book itself and listened to the second two audiobooks because I couldn't wait to finish the story, I had to know what was next.  The narrator was perfect!  Naomi Novik definitely earned a spot on my Favorite Authors list with this series and I cannot wait to read more of their work.