Washington Post called this book the “anti-Harry Potter you didn’t know you wanted.”

It is a little bit like Hogworts University … with sex and vodka.

But more than anything else this book is weird. It’s long. And by the end I still had not much idea what was happening to the students at the Institute of Special Technologies.

It seems this is the first book in the Metamorphosis cycle, three unconnected novels addressing themes of transformation.

Overall, I can’t enthusiastically recommend.

Vita Nostra is a novel by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko) first published in 2007 in Ukraine.

The novel tells the story of Alexandra (Sasha) Samokhina, who is forced by an unknown man to attend a remote and mysterious university.