When Miranda, watching her friends on Earth from the Penultimate after her death, notices that her best friend Lucy is in trouble, she sends word below to try and get her to safety. Miranda's boyfriend, the guardian angel Zachary, and his friend, the werewolf Kieran, enrol in Scholomance Preparatory Academy in the hopes of rescuing Lucy, but end up getting into a lot more than they'd bargained for. The school is run by the devil - literally - and getting out will be a lot more difficult than getting in. There are more innocent students to take care of than they had anticipated, and each day that passes is another day taking Zachary away from Quince, his assignment as a guardian angel. It seems as though the only way to exit the school with all the students may be through Hell - but once you've entered Hell, Lucifer wants you to stay.
Although this book started off slowly, I feel that was necessary in order to introduce all the characters and concepts. This novel is the fourth in a series, and I'd never read any of the others before. There was a lot of backstory to catch up on, and many characters introduced in just the first chapter. The point-of-view alternated with each chapter between three characters: Miranda, Zachary, and Kieran. Although I don't normally like alternating points-of-view, I found that this was necessary in order to keep up with all everything happening, especially toward the end of the novel, which becomes more eventful. It was also fairly easy to differentiate between the three characters, not from tone, but simply their surroundings and actions. There were also many new characters - the other students - brought into the story. I don't always have the easiest time keeping up with a lot of characters, but I found these were introduced in such a way that made it easy to remember who was who.
There were some points in the writing that I found to be inconsistent. There were a few instances where the descriptions kept running on in a way that led my mind to wander onto other topics. Then, there were a few moments where things happened so quickly that I had to go back and read it again in order to comprehend what had just occurred. The detail-overload to detail-underload threw me off a bit, but it did help to keep me on my toes for the later parts of the book.
Although I always love a happy ending, the conclusion of this novel was, simply put, cheesy. I can manage to throw away my knowledge of this world in order to replace it with the rules of the book's world while reading, but only if the book manages to stay realistic. I mean realistic in the sense that everything works together according to the book's rules, and all the characters have a full personality and are not one-dimensional. This book managed it until the very last chapter. Then it turned into more of a dream sequence and less of a happily-ever-after. Although I can appreciate the build-up that led to this scene, I think it could've been written a bit more artfully.
One thing that I think was done very well in terms of staying realistic according to the book's rules was the setting. It's difficult to write a book with religious elements without it being overly religious and offending someone. In my opinion, this novel did a fantastic job of combining elements of more than one religion (although there was one principal religion) and creating a world where this combination was realistic and not overly ideal. The world was very fully sketched-out (Heaven, Penultimate, Earth, Hell, etc.), which helped to make a not-very-religious person such as myself believe that a world such as this was possible (at least for the length of the book).
Overall, I thought that this novel was quite well done. It's been a while since I've had enough time to breathe, let alone read, and this book helped to bring me back into a headset where I could appreciate a book at the same time as I'm devouring it. I would rate this book a solid 3. 75 stars - or rounded up to four. I may read other books in this series if I came across them by chance, but I'm not going to go seeking them out. I would recommend this novel to anyone interested in Heaven versus Hell battles, supernatural creatures, and gothic academies.
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