The tactics used to push Sasha into enrolling in the first place are cruel, and they don’t lighten up once she’s there, with the school leadership coming across as entirely unconcerned with ordinary concepts of morality. It’s clear from the beginning that Vita Nostra’s version of magic school isn’t going to be fun and games. The novel follows Sasha through the end of high school and the first stage of her university career, as things go from odd and creepy to outright mind-bending. This is not a book that lends itself to an easy plot summary, but we start with Sasha, our teenage heroine, being manipulated by a mysterious stranger into reorganizing her life so as to put her on a collision course with an obscure rural institute of higher learning. I don’t have extensive experience with New Weird, but Vita Nostra feels like it could at least be a cousin. While there are coming-of-age elements, this doesn’t read like young adult literature at all-it reminds me more of Jeff VanderMeer’s work than of any other magic school novel I’ve read. But unlike the last magic school novel I read, this one is about as far from Harry Potter as you can imagine. The 2007 novel by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko was brought to the English market with a 2018 translation by Julia Meitov Hersey, and the dark magic school novel came with a solid wave of rave reviews. It’s hard to know where to start with Vita Nostra.
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