The Magicians, book #2: After the thoroughly shocking genre busting end to the first book, you'd think that this is it now, we're in a magical real with a dark underbelly? Strike out! This sequel continues with what worked well in the first book, an ingenious mix of urban and dark fantasy, as we follow the next steps of our Magician cast and also catch up with one of the original Brakebills' test failures! Quentin and co. go against all genre norms and actively avoid even a sniff of a quest, sag...

November 2021: Now I'm remembering why this was only four stars. What was otherwise a clever play on Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader had the oomph taken out of its sails (heh) by a completely unnecessary (view spoiler)[rape (hide spoiler)] scene at the end. More on this in a bit. Quentin is still having his identity crisis all over the place in this one, but he's much less obnoxious about it here than in the first book. The real centerpiece of this book is Julia, as we get to see her as Queen...

This series can be really frustrating because it takes everything you expect and think you know and goes "....nah." I enjoyed this book so much more than the first one. The characters, while still realistic and frustrating, grew on me a lot and I found myself really caring for them. The introduction of a "new" character was also a great addition as well, and I enjoyed learning about their backstory. I noticed a lot of connections being made between situations and characters in this book already,...

(This review contains spoilers for The Magicians (book 1 in this series), but no significant spoilers for The Magician King. It was originally published on www.tor.com on 8/8/2011 and on www.fantasyliterature.com on 8/16/2011.)At the end of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Brakebills graduate Quentin Coldwater abandoned a cushy but dead-end insecure job to become co-ruler of the magical land of Fillory with his former classmates Eliot and Janet and his erstwhile flame Julia. I absolutely loved the

Wow, I didn't think I could like Quentin Coldwater *less* than I did in The Magicians, but it is, in fact, possible. There is no moment in this book when I do not despise the protagonist.At least in this one, we got Julia's story, which had some interesting moments, especially the scenes in the safe houses. It also had some really bad moments. In no particular order: I am insulted on behalf of us non-magical scholars that the Murs magicians come up with a system that ties together all world reli...

I am so annoyed by this book, and not for the reasons I thought I'd be. The two things that irritated me about the first book weren't as bad here--specifically, Quentin was less whiny (I couldn't stand him in the first book; he was more bearable here), and the sexism that ran through the first book was really toned down. (I could never tell if the sexism was supposed to be Quentin's voice, or if it was latent from the author. I suspect the latter.) At first, I thought Julia was going to be a man...

First, if you didn't like the first one? Pass!You're not going to suddenly fall in love with these characters or this style of depressed storytelling. But for those of you who loved The Magicians, or maybe even those of you who were on the fence, I think this will be a winner for you. Because instead of starting out in Hogwarts and ending up in Narnia, this one is basically just a huge adventure quest, so it doesn't leave that odd sort of fractured plotline taste in you mouth. Not saying tha...

A book has never made me so angry before. I am absolutely bewildered that 93% of people like this book. No offense, but I think you all deserve a fucking double-slap across the face. This was, hands down, the worst book I've ever read. Where is the zero star possibility, Goodreads? Because, for this shitty fucking book, we need one. In The Magicians, I felt that Lev Grossman was actually a beautiful writer, and that's one of the reasons I gave it two measly stars. Here, though, Grossman just sh

*** 3.44***A Buddy read with the Wednesday Group @ BB&BThis was better. Better because we had the story of Julia. When the book started I thought I had missed something, since it was an idyllic picture of life in Fillory, where Quentin and Julia were co-rulers of the magical world, together with Eliot and Janet. Eliot is settling very well into the role of High King and all seems to go very well. I was a bit stumped... Why Julia? I was very pleased to be filled in into her story after she failed...

The Continuing Adventures of a Smug Magical Asshole, as written by An Asshole. and now featuring The New Adventures of a Completely Self-Absorbed Bitch.i suppose i understand the acclaim that has been heaped on Grossman. he is playing with tropes as his characters play with magic. he has a puckish sensibility that makes reading his series a tart and spiky experience. his tone is breezily casual and entirely unsentimental. and since Snark is the New Law of the New Millenium, the snark that is del...

If Quentin Coldwater stumbled on a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, he’d constantly complain about how heavy it was and how the coins didn’t fit in any vending machines and why couldn't they have just put the money into a nice cashier's check that he could have fit neatly in his wallet and then deposited in the bank? In the first book, Quentin was a brilliant but disillusioned teenager who found life a boring slog and desperately wished that things were more like his favorite fantasy series

Quentin and friends are the kings and queens of Fillory and everything is marvelous. Or it is, until it becomes apparent that something is wrong. King Quentin takes it upon himself to fix things. With Julia in tow, he sails to the ends of Fillory to fix the world. Can he succeed in the quest of a lifetime and save Fillory?If The Magicians was Lev Grossman's Harry Potter with a healthy slice of Narnia, The Magician King is Lev Grossman's Lord of the Rings. Grossman takes all the quest story stapl...

3.5/5 starsI've gotta admit, I didn't enjoy this as much as book one, but it's still so interesting. I love that this series is like a more "realistic" fairy tale where not everything is perfect and amazing all the time, but it's still not really an anti-fairy tale.The characters are still wonderfully flawed, and I really enjoyed getting to see more of Julia's back story, but it was just harder to get through. It didn't grip me as much as book one did.The audiobook narrator is still fantastic th...

”She’d always liked Quentin, basically. He was sarcastic and spookily smart and, on some level, basically a kind person who just need a ton of therapy and maybe some mood-altering drugs. Something to selectively inhibit the voracious reuptake of serotonin that was obviously going on inside his skull 24-7. She felt bad about the fact that he was in love with her and that she found him deeply unsexy, but not that bad. Honestly, he was decent-looking, better-looking than he thought he was, but that...

Book two is fulled with even more sexism then the first one, which is almost hard to imagine, but Lev Grossman manages to pull it off by writing like some kind of horny per-pubescent teenager looking for any flimsy excuse whatsoever to get his female characters topless so he can describe their breasts in feverish, obsessive, totally unnecessary and excruciating detail.

Let me begin this review by saying that I really enjoyed Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I didn't think it was perfect, by any means - I wasn't keen on Quentin, and the saga of his relationship with Alice and how he behaved about it really pissed me off - but altogether I found it to be an original, enjoyable, and gloriously escapist read. I will admit that I am not the biggest fan of all-out fantasy, but I liked the fact that The Magicians couched its fantastical elements in a recognisable versio...

"...he thought he'd learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might've been the wrong one."I would say that I enjoyed this installment only slightly less than The Magicians. I've seen quite a few reviewers say the last two books in this series made up for how little they enjoyed the first, but having read The Magician King I honestly don't understand that statement.The storytelling is somewhat more focused on a "quest" if you will, but for me this book...

_The Magician King_ is a good book. Still, I found the first half to be a bit of a slow start that was by turns frustrating and enjoyable in almost equal measure, so I kept vacillating between a 3 and 4 for it, so I think it ends up for me at a fairly solid 3.5. The book itself is divided into two more or less equal story halves: one follows Quentin and his friends in Fillory as they go on a diplomatic mission of purely cursory import that turns into a fairly inconsequential 'quest'…this in turn...

Volume 2 of a trilogy! (Pause for review readers to leave in droves)OK, thank you for staying. So, The Magician King is indeed volume 2 of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy. The first book in the series was a New York Times bestseller, I don’t know if the other two books are also bestsellers. I read The Magicians in 2014, I thought it was pretty good but, like many Goodreads reviewers, I disliked the protagonist Quentin Coldwater. I thought he was a twat, useless, annoying and selfish. For t...

When I finished The Magicians I found myself confused. Was Grossman satirizing the genre or contributing to it? I decided that he had set out to do the former, and wound up doing the latter. He somehow fell into that enviable position where his fantasy work was considered literary by the mainstream community that often scorns genre work. A sequel, it would seem to me, is more of a declaration. Satires don't have sequels. So called literary fiction doesn't often have sequels. Grossman goes all in...