Grief

Through the character of El, the novel explores the emotional impact grief can have on a person who has lost a loved one. Although El does not truly lose Orion—she believes she has for the first half of the novel. In these early chapters, El experiences intense grief because of how much she loved Orion and how deeply she had hoped to share a future with him.

Grief steals El’s ability to feel anything else. El loses Orion at the same exact moment she escapes the Scholomance—the school where she had gone into knowing she only had a slim chance of escaping alive. The moment should have been the best of the previous four years, especially considering she had devised a way to turn the school into a trap and save all the students inside. However, grief strips her ability to find any...