Vita Nostra

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This landed squarely in the wheelhouse of things that drive me crazy in a book - tedious descriptions of things that ultimately have no meaning; repetitious episodes (cf., 'Reservoir 13' and 'Milkman'); pseudo-profundity that doesn't really denote ANYTHING, or bear close scrutiny; schmaltzy ending.

Farit's unusual "tasks" continue when Sasha and her mother go home. Sasha finds herself alienated from her friends, and distanced from her mother, who does not understand what strange pressures her daughter is under. It only gets worse when Sasha informs her mother that instead of the university they both planned on, she has to attend the Institute of Special Technologies, a technical school no one has ever heard of in a small town that's practically off the map. Ivanova, Ekaterina (October 2016). "On Both Sides of Fiction: Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko". Russian Studies in Literature. 52 (3–4): 235–248. doi: 10.1080/10611975.2016.1264003. ISSN 1061-1975. S2CID 193721913. Julia Meitov Hersey, the translator of Vita Nostra, describes her effort as a work of love, undertaken so that other English language readers will be able to enjoy the delights the Russian-language book first brought her. The book has been described as an “anti-Harry Potter novel”, and insofar as it offers a darker, more mysterious, and philosophical version of the ‘magical recruit’ trope, this is true. But it’s far and away a very different beast from J. K. Rowling’s celebrated series.To live is to be vulnerable. To love is to fear. And the one who is not afraid — that person is calm like a boa constrictor and cannot love.”

The story behind the cover of Vita Nostra The Story Behind the Cover of Vita Nostra, by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko For the same reason, I thought the ending was a bit forced. There wasn't strong enough of a buildup to Sasha's choice of "love over fear" during the final test, and that choice itself seemed somewhat contradictory to her character, given that the main conflict between her and the teachers had always stemmed from her craving for new knowledge and power, not love or fear for the people around her. Flying Hat ( Russian: Летающая шляпа) (with A. Bondarchuk and I. Malkovich) Published in Ukrainian. You are struggling, I know. Because your efforts are connected to — or, rather, limited by — what is internally permissible. You have a very clear notion of what is acceptable and what is not. I’m not talking about everyday things, the so-called principles, I am talking about the inner configuration of your personality, and of your ability to overcome stereotypes.” Sasha, the girl from the blurb, gets compared a lot to Harry Potter, because she went to a magical school. But that's probably it, if we have to compare them. Where Harry had a cozy room in magical dorm with faithful friends and many adventures - Sasha had a not so cozy post-soviet dorm (imagine something among these lines "In Soviet Russia you didn't live in dorm, the dorm lived in you!"), her friends were lost and confused in the process of education as much as she was and they weren't that much helpful, to be honest, as I see it, although of course there was a certain desperate clinging to each other in the face of their mutual Unknown.It’s difficult to escape the Harry Potter comparisons that always seem to appear in discussions of Vita Nostra. I have to disagree—I don’t think there are many similarities at all. Although they both have schools, the contents of these two books are totally different. I think it’s unfair to market this book as a darker Harry Potter when they are so contrasting in tone, atmosphere, and plot that Harry Potter never would have come to mind had I not read some comparisons online. However, there is one book that I can connect pretty convincingly to Vita Nostra: Babel by R.F. Kuang. I know R.F. Kuang has read Vita Nostra and likes it because she is quoted on the cover of the sequel. The way the two books are written and the discussions of language they contain stood out to me especially as similar elements. As someone who likes both novels, I thought it was interesting to note how one might have had a hand in inspiring the other. For the first half, I felt a little indifferent to the story. I wasn't taken away by the writing style; I wasn't really sure where it was going and how much I cared about our main character or the narrative. But then the second half came along, and holy shit, this book is wild. I didn't fully understand it all, but boy, did I love it! Anyway, "Vita Nostra" occupies a fascinating liminal literary space between fantasy and hard sci-fi, and between your typical urban/academy fantasy and literary fiction. The main character, Sasha Samokhina, is a teenager who turns out to have an amazing, massive, magical gift. What that magical gift is, though, is not revealed, not even to her, until the end of the book. Instead, she's coerced into completing a series of nonsensical tasks, and then forced into enrolling in a peculiar institute in a small provincial town.