Teaser Tuesday: “Vita Nostra”

So this week I was reading Vita Nostra, by the Ukrainian authors Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko, with a translation by Julia Meitov Hersey. The premise of this book is, basically, that a seemingly ordinary girl, Sasha Samokhina, meets a mysterious figure named Farit who informs her (more or less; more less than more) that:

1. Magic is real; and
2. She has to go to a remote college to learn it. Like, literally has to. They won’t let her not.*

If you are thinking, Oh, I’ve read this story before … Trust me, you haven’t.

So you know how, in the Harry Potter books, when Harry is invited to join the world of magic, he gets whisked off on a magical motorcycle to a vast school full of wonders and mysteries, where he gains a set of powerful protectors and eventually forms a small army of friends to battle evil? Yeah, none of that happens to Sasha. Plenty of other stuff does, though.

“Imagine a newborn baby who suddenly, over the course of one minute, became a grown man with the appropriate constitution and physiological characteristics. His essence has been changed. Don’t you think that his old shape would be an obstacle? A small body, swaddling, diapers—all that stuff would crack, letting out the new mature specimen. The same thing is happening to you, Sasha. Your essence is changing, and your shape is lagging behind and is not reacting adequately. That’s the source of this minor annoyance, such as scales, feathers, and extra arms.”

Yeah, you know, minor annoyances, like unexpected skin problems or a new limb sprouting out of your back. Makes it easy to put your hat on and take it off while you’ve got your regular two arms full, anyway.

I will freely admit that I had no idea where this book was going or how exactly the magic system works or what exactly the students’ roles are going to be if and when they graduate, but it was fascinating to read. You can and should ignore the comparisons to other books, including the ones they put on the cover and/or in the description; this is nothing like The Magicians, or … All right, I will cop to not having read Max Barry’s Lexicon or Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, so I can’t say if it’s anything like them. But I’m willing to bet it’s not**. If I had to compare this book to anything, it would be some of the James P. Blaylock books I’ve read—maybe not The Rainy Season, but it did remind me in some strange way of The Last Coin and The Paper Grail. I could definitely see those two books existing in the same universe as this one.

Only without, you know, the extra arms and stuff.

* Or, more accurately, if she doesn’t, Very Bad Coincidences will happen to befall her family members. Hmm, Farit must be from Slytherin House …
** Welllll, based on some spoiler stuff we eventually learn, I guess it might be a little bit like Lexicon, just on the basis of the title.