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.
If you found Shards, Assassin, and Vita Nostra interesting, you might enjoy reading my review of 100 Ghost Soup.
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