Nightschool is the creation of Svetlana Chmakova, who is one of my current favorite creators. She's the brilliant mind behind the Berrybrook world: Awkward, Brave, Crush and Diary. (An E book is slated for next year. Yay!)
You don't really see much of Berrybrook Chmakova in Nightschool. It reads more like a typical manga that could have been written by anyone. The characters are interesting, but there are a lot of them and sadly, the short run only just touches upon them, which is its largest failing.
The world of Nightschool shows how supernatural creatures, which are simply called "night things" (boring), get their education. There's a human school that transforms at night to become Nightschool. There are vampires, werewolves and other "shifters," demons, mermaids, and weirns, which are a distinct type of witch that has a demon bound to them from birth. These demons are called Astrals and you can see Alex's Astral in the upper right on the cover there.
I have no idea how to pronounce "weirn," which drives me nuts. My German-focused mind says something like vie-ern. (Sort of like "iron" with a V in front.) But it's probably really something simple, like "weird" with an N.
The story in Nightschool is quite complex. Alex's older sister is the night guardian, who basically makes sure the school looks presentable before it becomes a human school again in the morning. Why they don't just have their own school is beyond me. Seems like it would be easier. But anyway, her sister goes missing to the point that no one knows who she is except for a handful of select people. Alex goes to school to investigate and the book is mostly about her trying to find her sister while all these other complex storylines weave around it. I don't want to give too much away, so I won't go into detail. I also don't want to try to write it all out because there's a lot!
Seems like a good place for a photo of the second collected volume.
Anyway, I'll touch briefly on some of the character groups.
Alex is the main character, a weirn girl. She's not very likeable, but she's written that way on purpose. She was cursed and if she shows affection towards anything, bad things happen to it. So she's very, very cold and distant.
Of the students, you mainly see one older clique of three (Ronee, Sion and Remy) plus Ronee's younger sister Rochelle, who is Alex's age. Ronee, Sion and Rochelle are all weirns. Remy is a demon. (I liked Remy a lot.) Rochelle is more bubbly and likeable, but she has to be. She's like a foil of Alex, who has to remain distant. Rochelle's thing is apparently a bloodline curse. If she becomes upset it causes actual physical pain to her older sister, Ronee. Weird. Ronee is one of the few people who remembers Alex's sister, so they work together in the second volume.
Then there are the Hunters, a group that protects humans from night things. You meet many of them, though three are sidelined at their first appearance, which annoyed me because the character with by far the coolest design is one of them. Their leader, Daemon, is extremely powerful and pretty awesome.
Mr. Roi is one of the Nightschool teachers and he's crazy powerful, too, as is the principal. These two characters and Daemon are all Night Lords or Nereshai.
There's a young seer character named Marina who's instrumental to the story. She's not a Hunter, but connected to them.
Nightschool was written more for an older audience. The characters are mostly older and the plotlines and actions are, too. I feel like the length is what caused the problems I have with this. There's a lot of world-building, but it leaves you with more questions than answers. There are a lot of characters that leave you wanting to understand them better. This needed to be a longer, more drawn out, way more in-depth series.
So Chmakova moved on to do the Berrybrook world and at some point, she must have thought "I can combine these!" And so she did.
The Weirn Books is basically Berrybrook set in the Nightschool world. The characters are younger and more developed in one volume than the Nightschool cast throughout the entire run. Like Berrybrook, it's aimed at middle-grade readers.
The main cast are weirns. Ailis is on the right there, alongside her cousin Na'ya. They're kind of outcasts at school. Ailis is a bit awkward. Na'ya is obsessed with dragons and wants to be one. I have no idea how to pronounce Ailis, but her nickname is Leesh, so I'm thinking it's like Alicia without the "ia." Aleesh. With a short "a" or long "a" maybe. Ay-leesh. Hang on. Research time. Okay, it seems to be Irish, yet that's pronounced "Ay-lish" so the nickname for that would not be Leesh.
Seriously, authors, if you give your characters unusual names, put something in there about pronunciation. It's such a pet peeve of mine. It's easy to do a scene where another character is dragging out that name for some reason and that's a great place to stick in pronunciation. "Ayyyyy-leeeeeeeeshhhh."
Anyway. Other characters include the girls' grandmother, Na'ya's younger brother (D'esh), the werewolf boy Ailis has a crush on (Russ), the weird boy from next door named Jasper (he likes Na'ya), and the mean weirn girl at school (Patricia).
The plot is pretty simple. There's a spooky house in the woods and the girls learn it used to be a weirn school their grandmother and her twin brother attended. Grandma faked sick to stay home one day and that day turned out to be the one where all the kids and the teacher went missing. She never saw her brother after that. So shortly after learning this story, Patricia starts acting weird at school and the cousins are suspicious. Is this connected to what happened decades ago? Of course it is. But you'll have to read the book to find out how.
I absolutely loved this. Not on the level of Berrybrook, but it's not far behind. You don't need to read Nightschool to enjoy this new book at all. Nightschool is fun reading, so I do recommend it, even though I had issues with it, but it's definitely not necessary if you want to skip right to Weirn Books.
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