This is the most 3.5 book I’ve read in a long time. For two days I’ve deliberated on how much this book worked and how much I enjoyed it, and depending on which aspect of it I consider, it could go either way.

If it’s on a character level, seeing what happened to Sasha in the nebulous final pages of Vita Nostra was very compelling. I think she grows in this book as much as you would like her to in the first, which actually makes the outcome of the first book more understandable. The idea of grammatical functions as analogs for constructed reality, yet also being human beings has to be one of the most novel concepts in SFF I have ever heard of. And making it work in fiction, to this degree, is the feat of a wizard. Peoples’ personalities and their interaction with the meta fiction as constructs, even as you’re consuming fiction constructed of grammar, and the struggle of a character parallels the rules of those constructs even as Sasha struggles to be a character and bypass those “rules”.

However, on a plot level, I do feel it is less interesting than Vita Nostra. The reader still doesn’t really know what’s going on, so we follow Sasha in her figuring it out. But the fact that it does answer the largest questions, in some ways, makes it feel like the question is what primarily drove the most compelling aspects of the fiction. There are still some curve balls and the prose, though perhaps not quite as strong as the first book, propelled me along well, once I got used to the style again. But this is a very Middle book of a series novel. More is set up with Sasha and the plot spins the wheel more, while not getting as far. And because Sasha straddles this line of being emotionless as a construct or the push-pull of being human, there are some moments that necessarily don’t land because the emotional context is not present. Things are happening but they feed into this meta narrative. I have to imagine there is another book planned in this new (hopefully!) trilogy.