The Real Cost of a Magical Education

Blood, sweat, and tears in Naomi Novik’s scholomance novels

- By Sarah Skwire

Naomi Novik began her series of fantasy bildungsromans, in part, because she found Harry Potter extremely irritating. What annoyed her more than anything was the lack of economic thinking that went into J.K. Rowling’s world building. “The world, when you start poking at it, doesn’t work,” she explained in a September 2021 interview with Polygon. “Magic doesn’t cost anything, right? So why are the Weasleys poor? Half of them are adults, fully grown certified wizards, all of them apparently quite talented and smart. If magic doesn’t cost anything except the time it takes to learn it and cast it, then the more wizards you have, the richer you are, right? Wizards should be trying to have all the kids they could possibly have.”

One doesn’t want to sound like a Death Eater, but the harder one looks, the more one suspects that the world of Harry Potter doesn’t hang together. Why don’t the Weasleys just magic up some new robes for Ron? Why do hand-me-downs exist in a wizarding world? Why haven’t the Weasleys, and other wizarding families like them, led a revolution? And why in the name of Dumbledore would anyone who can do magic send their equally magical child off to a school where children are regularly turned to stone, set upon by Dementors, and even killed?

“There has to be some sort of terrible reason,” Novik posited to