That Devil Ambition
by Linsey Miller
Dark Academia
Fantasy
Supernatural
Review #1
* * * Stars (Pretty good)
For students Fabian, Credence, and Euphemia, their sixth and final year at the magic school of Stellarium comes with great risk- but great reward. They and ten other students have been chosen to take the school’s honors class, which is taught by the devil they summon on the first day. Their only goal is to kill it before the end of the year, when it kills them all.
Success offer prestiege, wealth, opportunity- and importantly for several- a waived tuition. Failure means to be forgotten forever.
This book was meh. Milquetoast. It wasn’t good, nor was it terrible.
There are three point-of-view characters, splitting the book into a fairly clean three acts. The first POV character I found to be annoying, and despite hinting at depth, the book never explored it. The second wasn’t annoying, but was boring- and forgettable. As of writing, I just finished the book and I could not speak on a single character trait she has. The third I found to be the most interesting, and of the three, the only one whose perspective I enjoyed reading. How she was characterized before her narration was very different from how she acted internally; in the story, this made sense, and it was interesting seeing her deal with that contrast. To be fair, none of the protagonists are particularly likeable and I think that is on purpose- they are ambitious, after all.
I was disappointed that the book didn’t allow the main three to grow very much- but that may also be because I’ve gotten used to books where character development is the main focus, or that I simply prefer internal over external conflicts. The conflicts in this book were almost entirely external.
There isn’t any clear, singular antagonist in this book; the Professor, the devil the students must kill, seems like one but doesn’t feel like one in practice. He helps the protagonists just as much as he stands in their way. Another student, Irene, fits the antagonistic role better- but is only relevant for about a third of the book. Neither of these are necessarily bad things, but do affect how the plot feels.
The worldbuilding was okay. That’s something I’m usually a fan of, so I’m almost always disappointed when I don’t get enough of it. But even then, I enjoy working with scraps and piecing things together well before they’re fully explained- but even that did not happen here. There were six or seven different countries that were named, but most weren’t described in enough detail to be differentiable. There’s a “Great War” that has been mentioned a few times, but its relevance to the plot- being the reason the goal of the class is to kill a devil- ends up being contradictory with a plot twist at the end of the novel. The magic system took me roughly a third of the book to figure out the basic mechanics of, and a major component of it- “throwing”- took me until nearly the end to realize that the characters weren’t literally defenestrating each other (instead, they’re dissolving each other into particles and teleporting/moving those). I found the concept to be interesting, and it managed to make the existence of angels and devils not feel like cheap fantasy.
I’m probably not the best audience for this book, and especially not right now- I recently finished binging the entire Stormlight Archive series, which differs from dark academia in so many ways. But I have also read dark academia in the past, and this is not the most interesting out there. For high school readers.
