Farit assigns Sasha other tasks as she grows, and when it comes time for college she receives an acceptance letter to a school she never applied for in a town she’s never heard of: The Institute of Special Technologies in the town of Torpa.Īlthough the curriculum at Torpa is harsh, it proves to be fascinating to Sasha. He is not a man to coddle his students, and his brand of love is laced with fear. He is harsh and brooks no disobedience – he is a rule, not a guideline. In the wee hours of the morning.įarit Kozhennikov is not a kind man. And that the man in the dark sunglasses was simply a pervert who used a very convoluted way of spying on naked girls on the beach. Of course, one could assume that Sasha’s stomach couldn’t handle yesterday’s baklava, and that the coins were simply lying in the exact place on the gravel where she became sick. Her throat felt sore, but the nausea had disappeared completely. Hearing them, Sasha stretched on her cot, covered her head with a blanket, and squeezed the coins in her fist, thinking hard. The first beachgoers appeared on the Street That Leads to the Sea. Each time she completes the task, she vomits strange, golden coins onto the beach. Until her alarm fails to ring one morning, and the new man her mother has been seeing is taken away in an ambulance due to a heart attack. It is very, very important that she not be late. Her concerns are not allayed when he finally speaks to her, giving her his name, Farit, and a strange assignment: she must wake up every morning at 4AM, go down to the beach, remove her clothing, and swim out to the buoy without fail and without being late. When a mysterious man begins following her, she quickly begins to fear for her safety. She feels younger than her years, joyously going down to the shore and swimming with her mother. The book opens on a day at the beach for young, 16 year old Sasha Samokhina.
If this is Harry Potter… it’s Harry Potter without Voldemort, without Dumbledore, and on acid. Were I forced to compare it to another, The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan comes closest… yet even it has markedly different content. It is a book without chapters, without clear plot or goals. They are assigned strange and esoteric mental exercises, forced to run until they can’t any more, even forced to prostitute themselves. The students sit under constant threat of severe retribution should they fail to perform – up to and including the deaths of their loved ones.
While it is a book set in a magic school, it is dissimilar to most everything else I’ve encountered in the magic school subgenre. Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko is difficult to compare to other books without giving an incorrect impression. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell.
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