“The hero pays the price.”
Well, shit.
If you would have told me last month that not only would I give The Magicians (THE MAGICIANS) four stars, but that I would get so worked up by its sequel that I would burst into tears, I would NOT have believed you. I got soooooo mad and weird when I read The Magicians five years ago, I swore I would never read any sequels, or anything else Lev Grossman ever wrote, and then somewhere along the line I changed my mind, acquired the sequels (in hardcover even) and decided to re-read. As of writing this, I haven’t written my review of #1 because it’s going to take some thinking, but I wanted to shoot off a quick review of this one before it fades from my mind.
The Magician King picks up two years after the end of the first book. Quentin, Julia, Eliot and Janet are kings and queens in Fillory, but Quentin has grown fat and bored with his pampered life, because of course he has. Quentin has always been the kind of person who is so up his own butt that he expects the world to just give him what he needs to be happy. It’s this weird privileged mindset that all of Grossman’s genius character seem to have, but Quentin is the worst of the lot. This turns out to be okay, though, as the book is very much about his journey to unlearn the way he sees himself and the world. Essentially, Quentin has to grow up, and he has to do it the hard way.
Another thing that elevates this book above the first one is that half of it is Julia’s story. It fills in the blanks, how she got from that winter’s day when she failed the Brakebills exam to being the most powerful magician that any of them know. In a lot of places her story is sort of hard to read, but it’s also really interesting, seeing the back-alley approach to magical education. I thought the parallel narratives actually worked really well together, as Quentin and Julia et al go questing in a very Voyage of the Dawn Treader meta sort of way in the present day story, right alongside the flashbacks into Julia’s magical education.
Anyways, I’m super glad I got back into this series, and I have high hopes for the third and final book.
