Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of.
Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures instead, it is their families that pay a terrible price. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Situated in a tiny village, she finds the students are bizarre, and the curriculum even more so. Sasha Samokhina has been accepted to the Institute of Special Technologies. The definitive English language translation of the internationally acclaimed Russian novel-a brilliant dark fantasy combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way. It’s a book that has the potential to become a modern classic of its genre, and I couldn’t be more excited to see it get the global audience in English it so richly deserves.” - Lev Grossmanīest Books of November 2018 - Paste Magazine “ Vita Nostra has become a powerful influence on my own writing. Like the exercises Sasha works through in the novel, Vita Nostra seems at first to be just beyond comprehension, but as readers proceed, it becomes more and more intoxicating as understanding blooms in the reader’s mind.“Vita Nostra” - a cross between Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian” is the anti-Harry Potter you didn’t know you wanted.” - The Washington Post
Maturation is itself addressed as a form of transformation over the course of the novel, explored through several facets of Sasha’s life as she departs girlhood and grows into womanhood while attending the Institute. The strangeness of the Institute is most apparent in the Specialty course, where students are given bizarre coursework: memorizing passages they can’t read and that make no sense, booklets of 'exercises' that seem impossible to solve, even assignments given on CD audio tracks.
The novel reads at first like an ominous and mature Harry Potter: rather than an unhappy child transported to a magical school to explore almost endless possibilities, Sasha is taken from her fairly happy though mundane life and brought to a postsecondary institution with one course of study and only one possible outcome.
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