A book clearly written by someone who read the Harry Potter books and knew she could write a better, more interesting, more complex series of wizard school books. And she has! This book is SO GOOD. A young wizard woman (high school junior), enrolled at The Scholomance, the wizard school, and her various travails trying to stay alive. She is extremely prickly, owing to the combination of a somewhat unusual upbringing, even for a wizard, and a prophecy that she would go wrong, very wrong, at some point. She has spent her school years so far hiding her enormous power under a barrel; she has no friends; the wizard world is stratified in interesting ways. Also, the student wizards have such an interesting economy, in which they're constantly trading what they have for what they need. (I subsequently learned that the Scholomance was a "fabled school of black magic in Romania," per wikipedia. Okay, then!)

The second in the series. As graduation draws near, things get more and more serious, but also, El finds her people and begins to act more like a human. Things....head up elsewhere.