After finishing A Deadly Education I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about continuing the series, but I'm a sucker for a cliffhanger ending and for wanting to know what happens next. That book ends with a message from the protagonist's mother exhorting her not to go near the boy who is clearly being set up to be her love interest, and I wanted to see how that would play out.

If you go into The Last Graduate hoping that there would be some payoff to that cliffhanger, as I did, then prepare to be deeply disappointed. It's dangled in front of us throughout the book as El's relationship with Orion deepens, but we're never given any explanation for that cryptic message. I assume this is something that's going to be explored in book three, but I'll never know because - despite the second cliffhanger ending here - I have no desire to read any further in this series.

I think that strictly speaking this is a better book than A Deadly Education. It as all of the same problems as that first book; it's filled with characters we don't know or care about (even more, this time around, as the cast of characters is dramatically expanded into an even more amorphous mass of indistinguishable characters with different names), everything comes so easily that the stakes never feel actually real or meaningful, and I spent vast swathes of the novel asking myself why I was meant to care about any of this. It's better only inasmuch as there's a little less focus on huge chunks of exposition about the world that say a lot without really contributing anything (though these aren't completely absent, alas) and because the characters do actually have a tangible goal this time around. Structurally it's a little less Monster of The Week, but it's still excruciatingly repetitive. And for books about magic school, the actual Magic School parts of the story - the lessons, and learning the magic, and all that fun stuff - are surprisingly lacking.

I'd love to find a magic school book that I really enjoy. These, unfortunately, are not it.