Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
I wasn't super wild about it on my first read, but it's worth the revisit, I think my initial read was too strongly influenced by taking the first chapter as borderline parody, which clashed with the actual book. On reread it works a lot better because I get the story isn't actually tongue in cheek so much as a very amusingly written take on actually dark subject matter. There's definitely some tongue in cheek going on - the delightfully heavy handed cliches for instance - but it's not really the point.

I was hoping to get through both 1 and 2 before the third came out. Didn't quite make it though.
Personally, I think the Scholomance is best considered as a black comedy. It is a parody to at least some degree, because the numbers Novik throws out there are so far from being viable as that they can only be treated as absurd. Once you realize that, that it could not actually be as a bad as all this without the wizards having gone extinct millennia ago, it stabilizes into a darkly humorous bit of meta-commentary on YA grimdarkness.