Sometimes you read a book and you go temporarily insane. The first time I read this book, I’m pretty sure this happened to me. At the very least, I experienced some sort of existential crisis while trying to sort out my feelings for it. I definitely remember being so upset and flamboozled that I started crying while writing my review over on Goodreads. I still think this book could have maybe been executed a little bit differently to let the readers know that Grossman was […]
400 Pages of I Just Can’t Even
I never liked Holden Caulfield. Crucify me if you must, but I did make the mistake of reading Catcher in the Rye as an adult, with adult sense and sensibilities. So I was really not sympathetic to Holden Caulfield at Hogwarts and I’m certainly not taking Holden Caulfield’s shit in Narnia either. Quentin (the Holdeness of all Caulfields) and his band of self-adsorbed fellow magicians now reign in Fillory (it really is Narnia adjacent) as self-adsorbed despots. Grossman loves to play with genres and tropes, but I […]
An excellent end to an excellent series
First of all, don’t read this unless you’ve read the first two books in the series — The Magicians and The Magician King. I read them both in June of 2012, and I wish I had reread them before tackling the final book, since it was hard to remember a lot of the story (it’s pretty convoluted, involving a lot of characters and twisty turns of plot). But I enjoyed the final book so much that I think I’ll just reread the whole series, start to finish, as soon […]
“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.”
The Magician’s Land is an exciting and satisfying end to a trilogy that had its ups and downs, but was nevertheless entertaining and always delivered on complex characters. Not to draw too clear of a parallel between the main character, Quentin, and the author here — because I’m sure Lev Grossman is not, and never was, the little shit that Quentin started out as — but I genuinely feel that there is some symmetry between the quality and goal of each of the books and […]