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Notes -
(I'm going to try to keep this more or less spoiler free, so sorry if anything's too vague.)
The school actually doesn't play that big a role in the story after the first several chapters; perhaps in a broad sense it's inspired by Harry Potter, in that most people writing in English today have probably read it and it is about a young man learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up, but it's a tenuous connection. It certainly feels nothing alike. Way, way more focus on world building and a world that (more or less) makes sense, a much more developed magic system (the story is reasonably restrained about when it decides we need to know all those details, but they certainly exist), and it is really primarily about learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up (mentally, at least). (And not petty social drama, poorly designed fake sports, or school life -- even as a kid I got frustrated at how bad Harry Potter was at keeping the focus on the things I wanted to hear about.)
The main conceit is the time loop; every month, time resets. Everything and everyone go back where they were before and (almost) everyone loses their memories of the intervening time, but not our protagonist. So, fantasy Groundhog
DayMonth. But while Groundhog Day is primarily concerned with the time loop itself (it was a much more novel idea back then, granted), MoL uses it as a vehicle to exhibit an intricately designed world, to section off a short stretch of time to explore how everything fit together in that moment. At first it all feels pretty painfully generic: run-of-the-mill D&D style fantasy world, one-note characters (of whom our protagonist likes roughly zero, so you only see them when they decide to come annoy him), disconnected and uninteresting events, and a very straightforward goal. But by going through that month again and again, we slowly uncover the rich detail that was hiding under the surface of all of those things, how many of them were just reflections of our protagonist's limited perspective and immaturity, and how he grows as a result.The character work is... actually just good, without qualification. So with the qualification that almost every character is literally incapable of learning or growing in any durable way because they're reset every month, it's impressive. All the more so because of how hard it is to find any decent characters at all in stories quite so autistically obsessed with detailing an intricate magic system. Part of that is just focusing on the protagonist, who can learn and grow, but it accomplishes a surprising amount through evolution of our understanding of characters that can't undergo actual evolution inside the time loop. I don't want to oversell it, nothing here is groundbreaking, but it's a plus instead of the minus it really should have been by all rights.
The overarching plot is fine-to-good, I'd say. It keeps the pressure up, which isn't easy given the premise, and there are enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. And, like everything else, there's a lot more going on with it than it seems at first. Still, it feels pretty distant most of the time, and for the vast majority of the word count it's just motivation to accumulate ever more knowledge and power. Which is fine by me, that's what I'm here for. It has the standard progression/incremental game hook of number-go-up and getting to do bigger, cooler things as the story progresses, finding shortcuts and new avenues to explore in the time loop -- all pretty basic, but fun. Like, a big goal early on is learning the teleport spell, because that allows us to reach places we couldn't before and to get to critical areas sooner in the loop. And with that power we can save the life of someone recommended as a mentor for another sort of magic we need to do something else, and so on.
Pacing is... eh, let's say 'deliberate.' The whole story is around three thousand pages. I wouldn't call any of it filler -- and in fact I enjoyed it enough I wish there was more; I've re-read it twice -- but it definitely takes its time and you've got to be ready to meet it on its own terms. I don't mind it, but I can certainly understand why someone would. I think it would be relatively easy to put down and pick back up later when you're in the mood, but I read it straight through all three times.
And, like I've said, the best part is the world building and magic, with satisfying mechanics and connections and almost fractal complexity.
On the whole... maybe this is an out-there take, but it kind of feels like Project Hail Mary to me (the book much more than the movie), in that it's focused on learning about and interacting with complex systems, understanding how they fit together and how they might be re-combined to accomplish a new objective. It's lonely in the same way at first, and less lonely later on in the same way too (though that is a bit of spoiler). And they both have an element of piecing together past events from limited clues, though of course that's handled very differently. Otherwise... Outer Wilds? For reasons that should be obvious if you've played it (which everyone should).
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