From The Storytelling Blog
School of Shards by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko: A Book Review

School of Shards concludes the story of Sasha Samokhina begun in Vita Nostra (reviewed here in 2019) and continued in Assassin of Reality (review here in 2023 ) by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko.  All books in the series were translated from the Russian by Julie Meitov Hershey.

Disclosure: I received an advance reader copy from the publisher, Harper Voyager, with no obligation to review.

School of Shards

In School of Shards, Alexandra (Sasha) must enlist help from the next generation of Torpa Institute of Special Technologies students to save the Great Speech and thus reality itself. The grand ambition she displayed in Assassin of Reality has led to momentous failure. The current crop of students aren’t developing properly, and the Great Speech is in danger of falling silent. Now, as the school’s head, she recruits three special students: her younger brother and the twin sons of her former lover, Yaroslav. Perhaps, Sasha can only hope, they hold sufficient shards of her special gifts to learn quickly. Can these young men prevent disaster?

“Are you planning to bring back prerevolutionary orthography?”

Important Shards

Like Vita Nostra and Assassin, Shards tells a compelling, high-stakes story while making the reader both care about the characters and think about the meaning of life, relationships, and the fabric of the cosmos.

The book opens with yet another student miserably failing an important assignment. Sasha realizes that she made a fundamental pedagogical error by sparing the students the terror her class felt as they struggled with the curriculum. “This issue isn’t just a matter of passing, but who is passing. The grammatical composition is unbalanced. There is a dramatic shortage of verbs…To put it bluntly, the Great Speech is degenerating, and the grammatical structure is declining,” Portnov said quietly.

And, outside of the protected space around Torpa, existence is vanishing. Life as we know it will soon wink out of existence. “The Great Speech did not tolerate simplification. Should the Torpa Institute…fail to produce a new generation of strong, well-prepared graduates, the world would go mute and cease to exist—it was that stark.”

Through good old-fashioned coercion, she and her colleague, Kostya, manage to recruit three promising students, and the reader follows them through their unique first year.

Socially inept, Sasha’s younger half-brother, Valya, shows remarkable mental talent, enough to get him in a great deal of trouble. The twin sons, Pashka and Arthur, of her pilot lover have special twin abilities, which can be both a help and a hinderance with what they need to accomplish to save the Great Speech.

Reader Experience

Definitely read the Vita Nostra series in order. While each tells its own story, they are interconnected such that you’ll want the experience to unfold before you and with you. That said, I found Shards to be a bit more explicit about what exactly is going on—the time for hints, mysteries, and guesses is over. We all know by now the real purpose of the school and the arcane curriculum the young people as tasked with mastering.

Readers who enjoy diagramming sentences (Me, it’s me. I’m the grammar nerd.) as well as stories like The Magicians (Lev Grossman’s novels and the Netflix series) will dive right into the depiction of cosmic issues at a magical school.

I keep wavering back and forth on how I felt about this. It took longer to pull me in than the first two books, but eventually it did become just as engaging. However, I found the characters a little thin this time around, maybe due to the fact that we were frequently bouncing around between multiple perspectives? The moving parts of the story didn't feel as deftly woven together as the previous installments, and the pacing felt a bit odd too. I am glad to have a conclusion to the series, but ultimately I think this suffers for a variety of reasons, some of which nobody could've controlled, and the fact that nothing will ever live up to Vita Nostra.

I was very fortunate to be given an ARC of School of Shards in exchange for an honest review. I was probably among the first readers to have read the first two books in the Vita Nostra trilogy, and I've been waiting for this entry impatiently. I'm so glad to see it finished. In my mind, it is the best book of the three - not only because the main characters are already developed - but because we get to see them reflected in the eyes of newcomers, the first year students at the mad magic school in Torpa. The story focuses primarily on the next generation of Words while describing the role of Sasha as the assassin and creator of realities. My heart ached for Valya, Sasha's brother, and the twin sons of Yaroslav, the brave pilot she had loved in book 2. The studies are back with a vengeance, and we get to follow our young heroes from acceptance to the institute to the conclusion of their studies. Their course of study is complicated by temporal loops, threats of arson, and impossible to complete homework assignments.
It was bittersweet to see Kostya, Sasha's first love, take the place of his father, Farit, who had terrorized Sasha and her fellow students into studying harder in the first two books. It gave me a glimpse of Farit's character in a way the first two books hadn't, and made me want to reread them. In all, I feel like rereading the entire trilogy, now that it's complete, is a good idea - I'm sure I will see things I haven't noticed before on second (or third/fourth look! I've reread them before).
This is just a magical book, suffused with affection for its characters, and I hope it finds more readers searching for fantasy and magical realism. Beyond the genre, though, it's a beautiful story of love, loss, and change, for anyone with a heart and a brain. It's been compared to Harry Potter for adults, but I'd say this is a far more complex universe, with multidimensional heroes, meant to engage you in ways HP never could.

Overall, a satisfying conclusion to a fairly intense trilogy! The stakes kept getting raised throughout, and this book wrapped it up in a way that was both logical and not too "just so," the way can sometimes happen. One major challenge was that this book got more and more conceptual as it went, which was enjoyable to a degree but less engaging emotionally. Still, quite good!