A review by bluejayreads
Vita Nostra by Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko

challenging dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I legitimately expected to DNF this pretty early in. The back cover didn’t sound super great (the “school where the lessons can’t be memorized” was the only intriguing bit), and I was very concerned about the adult man making a 16-year-old girl do “potentially scandalous” things. (If you’re concerned, it’s uncomfortable for Sasha but not inappropriate). The only reason I picked it up at all was because I’m trying to read new ideas from voices I don’t often hear and this book was a bestseller in Russia. I was kinda curious what a Russian bestseller would be about, but I didn’t have high hopes. 

This is going to be more of a list of the things I don’t understand. Starting with the genre – I think magical realism is the closest, but strong arguments could be made for low fantasy, psychological horror, or even contemporary. The back cover is pretty lame, but like the mentioned lessons defy memorization, this book defies categorization. I described it to my husband as “a magical school narrative, but if Hogwarts was a brainwashing cult,” and that’s close but still fails to capture the full essence of this novel. 

It’s impossible to adequately describe this book, the experience of reading this book, in words. It’s a first-person narrative of a girl falling into madness such that you don’t notice how mad she is until other characters point it out. It’s a first-person narrative of a girl whose eyes are opened to the true power within her and transcends her mortal form. It’s bizarre, surreal, uncomfortable and unsettling, and somehow made my reality outside of the book seem just a little bit off-kilter every time I put it down. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to stare at all wall for a while until you process what you just read. For a while I didn’t understand, and then I sort of understood, and by the time I finished I still didn’t really understand but I loved it. 

I still don’t know whose “side” the Institute is on, if they’re good or bad, or if those terms even apply. I still am not entirely sure if the deadly consequences that seem to happen whenever Sasha and her schoolmates fail are truly orchestrated by these people or if they’re all just terrible coincidences, though by the end I, like Sasha, tended towards belief. I still don’t know if I entirely “liked” this novel, but I do know that I was completely and utterly enthralled. Baffled, disturbed, and unnerved, yes, but also engrossed, captivated, and desperately curious to continue, to be in this book and this story and this … whatever exactly it is. The Dyachenkos have created an experience in reading that is akin to Sasha’s experience at the institute. It defies understanding, it defies explanation, it defies review, but all I wanted while reading was to continue to be immersed in this surreal and fantastic story. 
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