Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1) by Marina Dyachenko

"After being forced to make a deal with the devil, Sasha is accepted into the School of Special Technologies. The Curriculum is brutal, the teachers abrasive and demanding and discipline is deadly. Unfortunately, the characters were flat and the plot completely disintegrated after Part 1."

⭐⭐

Pros: The repercussions for students missing classes/exams are extreme and frightening but it keeps you reading/Some of Sasha's transformations were interesting, at first.

Cons: The characters were kind of flat and one dimensional. The Special Technologies that they're studying made absolutely no sense and as the book went on it just became more and more obscure and I found myself annoyed by it all.

Full Review:

Alexandra (Sasha) Samokhina is on Summer Holiday with her mother when she keeps seeing a man in dark glasses. At first, it feels like he's haunting her but every time Sasha wishes it was a dream, he just keeps appearing. Finally, he approaches her and tells her to swim out to a buoy every morning at the exact same time. Not completing this task will have dire consequences. And the one time Sasha oversleeps, her mother's boyfriend has a heart attack.

So, she knows the man in dark glasses means business. After awhile, once she's done everything he's asked, he explains to her that he's sponsoring her for entrance into the Institute of Special Technologies in the small village of Torpa. She's not really given a choice as to whether she wants to attend and once she starts classes, things just start getting weirder and weirder.

She and her classmates are asked to decipher nonsensical texts, practice exercises where they have to fit shapes into different shapes, in their minds. It's all obscure and confusing and honestly, it made absolutely no sense. As the semester progresses, it's obvious that Sasha has a real talent. Though when she goes home for break, she feels like a stranger and terrible things tend to happen.

It's obvious that she can no longer be around those she loves, and so, she becomes more and more reclusive and removed.

Honestly, by the end, all the obscure exercises, Sasha's transformation, it all became repetitive and just hard to understand. The book began with such promise but it just continued on a gradual downhill slide and I was ready for it to be over.

I won't be continuing the rest of the series.

Comments

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

“Rick Deckard is a Bounty Hunter who's on the trail of six "Andys" (Androids) who have come to Earth illegally. His job is to track them down and "retire" them. Something he found easy to do until he met her, Rachael Rosen. The Android that does the impossible, passes the "Voight-Kampff" test. The story quickly devolves into a slow, drawn out and frankly boring mystery that was putting me to sleep by the end." ⭐⭐ Pros: I was more interested in comparing it to the film, "Bladerunner."/At first I kind of liked the drab, dreary atmostphere but it soon became soporific. Cons: I had no real idea what was going on with Mercerism/The end there had me blinking in bewilderment, like with Herbert's 29th Dune Book/There was a lot of idle chit-chat while they were in murderous/intense situations, it just seemed odd. Full Review: Rick Deckard, a Bounty Hunter, contracted with the San Francisco Police Department hunts down and retires rogue ...

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