The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Novak, Naomi. The Last Graduate. Del Rey. 2021. Kindle.

The Last Graduate is the second novel in the Scholamance series. The book is narrated by the teenage main character, El, who has just finished her junior year at the magical school that was designed to protect teens from monsters during their formative—and most delicious—years. Despite the good intentions that went into building the school, only half the students make it out of the graduation hall, which becomes packed with hungry monsters who have been waiting all year to eat. The school had initially been designed with machinery that sprayed the hall with immortal flames to cut down on the number of monsters, but the machinery had broken ages ago. In the previous novel, El and Orion had snuck down to the graduation hall and fixed the machinery so the seniors would have a better chance of graduating. They were not sure exactly how their plan had worked, since they had no contact with the outside world, but when the freshmen got inducted into the school, one of them brought a note from El’s mother warning her to stay away from Orion. El had been a social pariah all through school, in part because of the incredible evil powers she was attempting to stifle, but in the previous novel she had developed a deep friendship with Orion, Aadhya, Liu, and Chloe. El decided to ignore her mother—and her increasing feelings for Orion—and focus instead on getting ready for senior year, which started the very next day.

Because El had the capacity for great evil, she was careful to live a “pure mana” lifestyle, which meant that she only generated her magic from meditation and exercise, because it would be too easy for her to start pulling energy from everyone around her and killing them all. Because of this, she had a limited supply of crystals full of energy to get her through school and the dangerous graduation ceremony, but she had used most of her mana up during the previous novel while fighting a maw-mouth—the same monster that had killed her father at his own graduation ceremony. El was prepared to start building enough mana so that she and her two allies, Liu and Aadhya, could make it through the ceremony, but the Scholomance complicated things by putting her in a series of dangerously located classes full of freshmen that she felt compelled to save. To make matters worse, El seemed to be the only student who was being attacked by monsters that year. Soon, she found she was losing more power and did not have enough time to build it back up. She worried that the school was trying to force her to become an evil maleficer. She told her allies and asked if they wanted to break their partnership, but they said no and encouraged her to talk to Chloe, who was a New York enclaver with a power-sharing bracelet. Chloe agreed to give El the power-sharer so that she would not become an evil maleficer. Chloe agreed and also asked to join El’s alliance with Liu and Aadhya.

The mals continued to only attack El, which meant that Orion stopped having monsters to kill. The New York enclave was entirely dependent on Orion’s powers because he was a monster-killing prodigy that never got attacked by monsters, and had an unquenchable capacity for killing them and generating intense amounts of power that fueled the whole enclave. Without Orion killing any monsters, the whole enclave started to get low, so El and her friends decided to try building a “honeypot” to attract monsters for Orion to kill, but their efforts ended in failures, so all the New York students had to start generating their own mana.

When the New York students realized that El was using their power stores because she was the only one being attacked, they asked her to join their enclave, but she did not want to be a member of the system she found so corrupt.

After midterms, the seniors finished their classes for the year and then began their semester of training in the enchanted gym that looked like an outdoor field and ran simulations for the seniors to fight through to practice for graduation. El and her team partnered with three other alliances to run simulations together, but then the gym started developing simulations so complicated that only Orion and El could make it through. Students lined up for the chance to train with them, and they agreed to go on a run with 50 other students, which inspired El to believe that she could somehow save everyone on graduation day by forcing everyone to collaborate together.

A few weeks later, Orion brought El breakfast and asked her to come eat with him on a picnic in the gym. However, the Shanghai enclave attacked them and tried to kill El because they thought she was conspiring against them. All El’s allies arrived, and a fight nearly broke out, but then El started to generate a supervolcano before calling it off and explaining that if she wanted to kill everyone, it would be easy for her to do so, but she truly wanted to save them all. After that, everyone in the school worked tirelessly to collaborate on a strategy to get out alive on graduation day.

However, El went down to the graduation hall and learned that all the monsters were cleared, and the seniors could just walk out. She decided that this meant she and the other seniors should work on a way to save the whole school—not just their class. Everyone agreed, and they concocted a plan to turn the whole school into a big honeypot that would trap hundreds of thousands of mals inside while all the students escaped back to the world. Then, El would set off a supervolcano and send the school floating off into the void. Their plan worked perfectly, and Orion and El were the last ones in the school after having saved everyone else. However, instead of leaving with her, like he had promised, Orion pushed El through the gate and stayed inside to fight a maw-mouth.