by Rachel Rosen

Some years ago, I had my brain melted and then rearranged by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra, which still remains one of my favourite fantasy novels—and fantasy series—of all time. Its long-awaited conclusion, School of Shards, is haunting, moving, and absolutely perfect. It’s one of those books that I put down and immediately wanted to reread, not only because it’s stunningly written, but because there were layers of theme and character that I wanted to pick apart.

School of Shards picks up in the new reality that Sasha created in Assassin of Reality—a world without fear, without plane crashes, without child death, but without free will. Now the provost of the Institute of Special Technologies, she has become the same knd of inscrutable taskmasker who terrorized her as a student. But the Great Speech is falling apart, and with it, the world outside of Torpa. And so Sasha must pull from her own past—her half-brother Valya and the twin sons of her former lover Yaroslav—to fix what she’s broken.

Even with the world closing in on the town and its strange magic school, this final chapter in the trilogy feels like it has a much greater scope. The post-Soviet malaise of the first novel expands to a global scale. Words, language, no longer holds the fabric of reality together. The central metaphor is so apt for our present moment, and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I just found myself thinking that this is a book that does what I want fantasy to do. This is why the genre is meaningful.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also note the elegance of Julia Meitov Hersey’s translation. As is fitting for a book about language, the language of the story itself is beautiful, lyrical, and melancholic.

I am grateful to Kyra DeVoe at HarperCollins for sending me an ARC.