Vita Nostra in Around the World in 80 Books

May 11, 2022 Karen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars. For about the first 60% of the book, I would have said 3 stars, but I liked the ending, even though I am still confused about some things. My only major criticism, is that I would have liked to have learned more about the other characters.

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Jul 25, 2021 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: author-white, author-man, author-woman, a-reviewed, z-challenge-readtheworld21, europe, z-read-gelesen-2021, authors-multiple, transl-russian, europe-ukraine

This is unrelentingly grim. Grim, grim, grim. I chose it for the Popsugar challenge Dark academia (and it certainly was that) plus for the July 2020 #readtheworld21 challenge: Eastern Europe (this one's from the Ukraine). And the Ukrainian setting is a good part about this book. The beginning grabbed me with its mysterious goings-on in a seaside resort on the Black Sea (I'm thinking Crimea?) but then: it does go on rather, and there is just more grimness without any plot twists or developments This is unrelentingly grim. Grim, grim, grim. I chose it for the Popsugar challenge Dark academia (and it certainly was that) plus for the July 2020 #readtheworld21 challenge: Eastern Europe (this one's from the Ukraine). And the Ukrainian setting is a good part about this book. The beginning grabbed me with its mysterious goings-on in a seaside resort on the Black Sea (I'm thinking Crimea?) but then: it does go on rather, and there is just more grimness without any plot twists or developments or internal character growth or explanations of why all this grimness is happening. I believe it's the first of a series or trilogy but the point of the first is that it does have a self-contained story with a satisfying beginning, middle and ending, leaving you wanting more in the next installments. None of this applies to this novel.

(view spoiler)[ The premiss is intriguing, if tropey: young persons are roped into attending a mysterious school of magic where they are bullied and threatened by irresponsibly authoritarian teachers, and undergo physical and mental changes as they proceed through years 1-3, falling in and out of love along the way. Other books, however, do this better: Harry Potter briskly introduces new characters, settings and spells to vary things, and introduces light-hearted bits to alleviate the grimness. Naomi Novik's Scholomance is just much better written and has characters I cared about and a deep moral backbone. In this book by the Dyachenko couple, I did not really care. The MC is unlikeable - in itself not a detrimental thing but I also stopped being interested in her about half-way through. She is The Chosen One but we never learn why she is Chosen, what is so Special about her, how she masters her challenges (except through just plodding on with them, and plodding on, and plodding on). She has moments of rebellion but never makes a moral choice. The teacher/mentor-pupil relationship is very disturbing: all of the key teachers are men and the way they interact with their female students is highly troubling. There is no sense of authorial distance from this troubling relationship which includes slapping, inappropriate touching, intense intimate settings, and a lot of tyranny. The MC learns to endure this and even to crave it -- undelectable undertones here. The translation is clunky. One teacher is described as 'the hunchback' throughout. Yes, the 'hunch' is explained in the final chapters but this kind of ableist label rankled. Heteronormativity reigns, and the female MC does not have a single meaningful relationship with any of her female fellow students; she focuses on the boys and the girls are described as petty, jealous and bitchy. The world-building is shoddy: why do pupils grow feathers and scales? They are all supposed to be 'growing' into abstract entities, "words" or somesuch, so why the physical transformations? What is the meaning of the coins they keep vomiting? What is the monster in the shady city? What is the meaning of all the exercises they must do? And what is the ulterior purpose they must fulfill? Are they being groomed to defend this world, à la Ender's Game? Or do they have some sort of genetic propensity, à la Star Wars' midi-chlorians? Too many loose ends, too much repetition of doing exercises, no moral or ethical kernel that I could discern.

Disappointing. I was expecting much from the authors of Ritual (upon which is based the fantastic beautiful movie On Drakon -- but maybe the movie is better than the book? Ritual remains untranslated into a language I can easily read). (hide spoiler)] ...more

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Feb 17, 2021 Tony rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, setting-europe, audio, translated-fiction, fantasy, teen

I picked this up mainly because I was curious to see what all the hype was about with this award-winning wife-husband Ukranian writing team, and this is the book that the library had available. I have no idea if it's representative of the bulk of their work, but it's one of the most boring works of fantasy fiction I've read in many many years. The book starts very slowly, with teenage Sasha Samokhina trying to figure out what her next step will be upon graduating from high school. She's a straig I picked this up mainly because I was curious to see what all the hype was about with this award-winning wife-husband Ukranian writing team, and this is the book that the library had available. I have no idea if it's representative of the bulk of their work, but it's one of the most boring works of fantasy fiction I've read in many many years. The book starts very slowly, with teenage Sasha Samokhina trying to figure out what her next step will be upon graduating from high school. She's a straight-A student, but everyone knows that you can't get into the good colleges without paying a bribe, and her single mother certainly doesn't have that kind of money. On vacation at a Black Sea beach, she encounters a creepy older man who follows her around and makes veiled threats about what might happen if she doesn't follow his bizarre instructions (trigger warning -- these include her getting naked and separately, urinating in public). When she does what he says, she vomits gold coins that she must keep hidden from her mother...

This setup -- which takes a huge number of pages to get through -- all ultimately leads to his inviting her to attend an unknown technical college in a small town in the middle of nowhere, where she will receive free tuition, room and board, and a stipend, as long as she obeys instructions. It felt like a very long-winded version of a basic "magical academy" setup -- a la Hogwarts, or The Magicians, or any other number of similar stories. I considered abandoning the book at this point, but thought the pace would pick up once Sasha was finally at school with others. Unfortunately, it does not -- if anything, it drags even more.

The school has everyone memorizing pages of gibberish text and solving abstract problem sets -- none of which is in the least bit exhilarating for the reader. Nor is Sasha developed as a character in any deep way, and while a few basic relationships are sketched out, she is so "special" and better than her classmates (all of whom were shanghaied in similarly odd circumstances) that she struggles to connect with any of them and there are certainly no rich relationships that make for engaging reading. At various points I kept almost putting it aside -- but convinced that there must be some huge payoff, I kept going. To the extent there is a payoff, it's certainly not worth the long slog to get there. This is considered the first book in the "Metamorphosis" trilogy, and I suppose readers with a taste for heavily mystical or philosophical fantasy may find this more to their liking, but I certainly can't recommend it. ...more

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