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....heat up elsewhere.

The eighth Martin Beck novel. He is back at work after time off after having been shot at the end of The Abominable Man. A bank robbery and the death of a man in a locked room happen at around the same time; the police fumble a lot.

Lesbian romance set in 1857. Fun, though not very believable. There are some anachronisms in the speech of the young women who are the viewpoint characters, plus you would not be wearing stays and a corset at the same time.

The third and final book in the Scholomance series. Holy moley, Novik landed a perfect ending to a complicated series.