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inverarityA surreal, dark Russian fantasy, the sequel to Vita Nostra.
Harper Voyager, 2021, 256 pages
Vita Nostra is a hidden gem and one of my favorite books, a unique and bizarre Russian fantasy written by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. The Dyachenkos are bestsellers in Russia but still relatively unknown in the West, despite more of their books being translated into English. I was entranced by Vita Nostra when I first read it over ten years ago, but I somehow missed until recently that there was a sequel (and in fact, there is a third book coming soon).
Assassin of Reality continues the story of Alexandra "Sasha" Samokhina, a student at the Institute of Special Technologies, where they learn to Contain Informational Structures and Express Concepts As Negations. In my review of Vita Nostra I made the inevitable comparisons to Harry Potter, as the Institute of Special Technologies is a sort of dark mirror of Hogwarts; more adult, more contemporary, more surreal, more sinister. Students arrive at a tiny, remote town where everyone knows the school exists but somehow have no interest in what it teaches, and students are put through grueling metaphysical challenges. Some (all?) of the teachers are not human, and some of them never were human. Terrible things happen when you fail a class; disasters happen, family members die, or never existed.
Sasha passed her third-year exam at the end of Vita Nostra, and became a Word. Or did she fail? At the beginning of book two, she seems to have been erased from existence, only to be brought back and witness an alternate reality in which she was never taken to the Institute, but instead died a mundane death in a car accident. Her mother and stepfather will never know that an alternate Sasha still exists.
She is brought back to the Institute of Special Technologies, and years have passed. Time is a fluid thing, as is reality. Sasha is made to take her third year over. Some teachers are trying to help her, while the sinister Coach seems to be trying to destroy her, though he says otherwise. Sasha has become Password, and can rewrite reality. She is, her teachers tell her, a threat to reality itself. Her tests are strange and surreal, and failure means people she love will die, and reality itself might unravel.
I found this book even stranger than the first one, if that's possible. It was often hard to follow just what was going on. The students and teachers are all living manifestations of Words in the Great Speech. Some are Nouns, some are Verbs, some are Personal Pronouns, and Sasha has become Password, a Verb in the Imperative tense.
This book almost certainly loses much in translation. I took a few semesters of Russian in college; it's a very difficult language, and it has many more cases and tenses than English. It's grammatically complex and I suspect many of the descriptions of the students and instructors as parts of speech resonate differently in Russian.
Much of Sasha's story is reminiscent of the "dark academy" subgenre popular today: students at a mystical school facing supernatural threats while engaging in affairs and rivalries. Sasha falls in love with a pilot (a "Muggle", a normal person from the outside world), and her arc is partly about staying human even as she has already become something more than human. Her love affair is destined to have an unhappy ending, but what kind? Is it really a dalliance, or is it critical to the role she will play when she Reverberates at last as a part of the Great Speech?
I liked this book, maybe not as much as Vita Nostra, but it's still a strange, dark contemporary Russian fairy tale that's not quite like anything else I've read.
Also by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko: My reviews of The Scar, Vita Nostra, Age of Witches, and Daughter from the Dark.
My complete list of book reviews.
Harper Voyager, 2021, 256 pages
The eagerly anticipated sequel to the highly acclaimed Vita Nostra takes listeners to the next stage in Sasha Samokhina’s journey in a richly imagined world of dark academia in which grammar is magic—and not all magic is good.
In Vita Nostra, Sasha Samokhina, a third-year student at the Institute of Special Technologies, was in the middle of taking the final exam that would transform her into a part of the Great Speech. After defying her teachers’ expectations, Sasha emerges from the exam as Password, a unique and powerful part of speech. Accomplished and ready to embrace her new role, she soon learns her powers threaten the old world, and despite her hard work, Sasha is set to fail.
However, Farit Kozhennikov, Sasha’s dark mentor, finds a way to bring her out of the oblivion and back to the Institute for his own selfish purposes. Subsequently, Sasha must correct her mistakes before she is allowed to graduate and is forced to do what few are asked and even less achieve: to succeed and reverberate—becoming a part of the Great Speech and being one of the special few who dictate reality. If she fails, she faces a fate far worse than death: the choice is hers.
Years have passed around the Institute—and the numerous realities that have spread from Sasha’s first failure—but it is only her fourth year of learning what role she will play in shaping the world. Her teachers despise and fear her, her classmates distrust her, and a growing love—for a young pilot with no affiliation to the school—is fraught because a relationship means leverage, and Farit won’t hesitate to use it against her.
Planes crash all the time. Which means Sasha needs to rewrite the world so that can’t happen...or fail for good.
Vita Nostra is a hidden gem and one of my favorite books, a unique and bizarre Russian fantasy written by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. The Dyachenkos are bestsellers in Russia but still relatively unknown in the West, despite more of their books being translated into English. I was entranced by Vita Nostra when I first read it over ten years ago, but I somehow missed until recently that there was a sequel (and in fact, there is a third book coming soon).
Assassin of Reality continues the story of Alexandra "Sasha" Samokhina, a student at the Institute of Special Technologies, where they learn to Contain Informational Structures and Express Concepts As Negations. In my review of Vita Nostra I made the inevitable comparisons to Harry Potter, as the Institute of Special Technologies is a sort of dark mirror of Hogwarts; more adult, more contemporary, more surreal, more sinister. Students arrive at a tiny, remote town where everyone knows the school exists but somehow have no interest in what it teaches, and students are put through grueling metaphysical challenges. Some (all?) of the teachers are not human, and some of them never were human. Terrible things happen when you fail a class; disasters happen, family members die, or never existed.
Sasha passed her third-year exam at the end of Vita Nostra, and became a Word. Or did she fail? At the beginning of book two, she seems to have been erased from existence, only to be brought back and witness an alternate reality in which she was never taken to the Institute, but instead died a mundane death in a car accident. Her mother and stepfather will never know that an alternate Sasha still exists.
She is brought back to the Institute of Special Technologies, and years have passed. Time is a fluid thing, as is reality. Sasha is made to take her third year over. Some teachers are trying to help her, while the sinister Coach seems to be trying to destroy her, though he says otherwise. Sasha has become Password, and can rewrite reality. She is, her teachers tell her, a threat to reality itself. Her tests are strange and surreal, and failure means people she love will die, and reality itself might unravel.
I found this book even stranger than the first one, if that's possible. It was often hard to follow just what was going on. The students and teachers are all living manifestations of Words in the Great Speech. Some are Nouns, some are Verbs, some are Personal Pronouns, and Sasha has become Password, a Verb in the Imperative tense.
This book almost certainly loses much in translation. I took a few semesters of Russian in college; it's a very difficult language, and it has many more cases and tenses than English. It's grammatically complex and I suspect many of the descriptions of the students and instructors as parts of speech resonate differently in Russian.
Much of Sasha's story is reminiscent of the "dark academy" subgenre popular today: students at a mystical school facing supernatural threats while engaging in affairs and rivalries. Sasha falls in love with a pilot (a "Muggle", a normal person from the outside world), and her arc is partly about staying human even as she has already become something more than human. Her love affair is destined to have an unhappy ending, but what kind? Is it really a dalliance, or is it critical to the role she will play when she Reverberates at last as a part of the Great Speech?
I liked this book, maybe not as much as Vita Nostra, but it's still a strange, dark contemporary Russian fairy tale that's not quite like anything else I've read.
Also by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko: My reviews of The Scar, Vita Nostra, Age of Witches, and Daughter from the Dark.
My complete list of book reviews.
