Most importantly, this final installment ultimately embraces a larger message of hope and resilience, one that says there’s nothing we’ve done that’s so bad we can’t fix it-if we all simply choose to find a better way together and refuse to give up on each other. But the tale is full of clever twists and meaningful resolutions to almost every major character’s arc, some that pay off groundwork laid hundreds of pages prior.

Everyone is complicit to some degree in the damaging choices that have built the world they’re living in and even the happy endings in this story come with bittersweet sacrifices attached. Unlike so many stories that have come before it, there are no easy answers in the series finale The Golden Enclaves. Full of monstrous creatures (known as “mals”) constantly trying to eat them alive on their way to class, the students must make uncomfortable, often class-based compromises to live until graduation, as the rich kids with better access to power and weapons take advantage of the less fortunate and the kids who don’t come from established enclaves make all manner of moral trade-offs to survive. Yet, if there is any series worth dipping your toe pack into this particular subgenre for, it is Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy, a compelling and morally complex saga about a magical school that trains up young witches and wizards by requiring them to fight for their lives from the moment they arrive. Let’s just say it’s not a surprise that a lot of people have decided to simply read other things. After all, rightly or wrongly, most of them still exist in the shadow of the Harry Potter franchise and given everything that has happened in the real world since that fictional one concluded, well. Many fantasy fans these days likely have some understandably mixed feelings about stories set in magical boarding schools. So here’s our attempt to narrow it down a little bit for you-the best fantasy books our team here at Paste Books read this year, which will hopefully have something for everyone.

What I’m saying is, there were a lot of incredible fantasy releases in 2022-more than could possibly fit on a single list or that one person could even feasibly get through in a single calendar year. Delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the publishing industry finally began to truly ease, favorite authors were crossing genres to write in the adult fantasy space, and multiple highly anticipated sequels and series’ conclusions seemed to arrive on what seemed like a monthly basis. While we were all rejoicing over the arrival of long-awaited adaptations like The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and The Sandman on our screens, the shelves at local bookstores were full to bursting with thrilling, magical new titles, in a perfect storm of new release kismet. The year of our Lord 2022 was a heck of a time to be a fantasy fan-in multiple mediums.

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