Am now just over halfway through The Last Graduate, the second Scholomance book. This one is, if anything, even more fun than the last one. It helps that it plays out over the course of months (I suspect a full year) rather than the days to weeks of the first novel, which gives everything a bit more space to breathe.

It also helps that Novik is a creative enough writer to really take advantage of the first person narration to fill up this space. Unlike a lot of first person books which are written like they're somehow a literal copy of the protagonist's thoughts and actions, this is explicitly a told (or rather written) account. So it's entirely natural for the narrator to leave things out until they're relevant, or go on long tangents, or make jokes because those are the things a person telling a story does. It isn't explicit when or how the account is written, it isn't a diary format and doesn't have a diagetic introduction explaining its origins or anything, but it makes for a pretty lively read. The told story nature also allows for time to be condensed or summarized really flexibly, so endless graduation practice doesn't take up tons of page count on repetitive action scenes.

This is great. Easily the most fun and best executed piece of genuinely contemporary fantasy I've read in a while.