REVIEW: THE MAGICIAN’S LAND BY LEV GROSSMAN

Title: The Magician’s Land
Author: Roshani Chokshi
Genre: Fantasy, New Adult
Pages: 402
My Rating: 5 stars

 

 

“So you want to know what we’re doing? We’re doing magic.
And if it comes off it’s going to be a fucking masterpiece.”

 

I’m so sad that I’ve finally come to the end! This was definitely my favorite of all three books in the series, and it tied everything together perfectly. The series was really long, and dragged a bit at the beginning, but the pace kept up throughout this whole installment and it felt like the exact ending I was looking for. (Even though I had no idea where it was all going to end up, ever) I love that Quentin spends time as a teacher at Brakebills and that he gets to see the school and everything involved with it from a different perspective. He’s older and knows more, and with this growth comes the ability to observe things more logically and rely less on his pinwheeling emotions.

Pros:
– a super tense heist to recover a suitcase that (probably) can’t be opened, magic carpets, talking crows, a recovered journal with a mysterious spell
– a library that contains books of every living persons life (past, present, and future)
– Quentin grows up! He’s not totally depressed all the time!

 

“He’d come a long way to get here. He was very far from the bitter, angry teenager he’d been in Brooklyn, before this all started, and thank God for that.

He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring—a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings—they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”

 

Grown up Quentin has progressed so far from first book Quentin, and I like him sooo much better. He’s done being totally unhappy with his situation and accepts things as they happen instead of trying to fight them. He has a way of looking at thing practically now instead of dying for his next escape from reality. The book has surprises around every page, and you never know where it is going to end up, but the story of how Janet got her axes especially stood out to me in this volume. It was nice getting to see into who Janet really is, and to see the character progression that she makes.

We got a lot more insight into the Chatwin children and what having Fillory was like for them as children, and what was and wasn’t true in the eventual books that Plover wrote. It was fun seeing things from way back become relevant in the current timeline and seeing things turn up when they were needed. I always enjoy it when the characters are adventuring and set out to do things based on a whim and a feeling and end up right where they need to be, and there was plenty of that in this book. The series itself is like a very complicated watch, in which all the gears appear to be working separately, but in reality they are all working together to reach a common goal/end game. Overall, high quality series that stands out on its own and has some great humor, messages, character growth, and unique plotlines.