In the wake of being cast out of Fillory and a short stint as a teacher at Brakebills, Quentin finds himself recruited to be part of a heist to steal a mysterious briefcase for a talking blackbird. Meanwhile, Eliot and Janet find that the magic sustaining Fillory is failing and its up to them to stop it...I got this from Netgalley.Well, Goodreads ate the review I spent 20 minutes writing so you're all getting shorter, probably angrier, version. There will be spoilers.The Magicians series by Lev

What an excellent conclusion to a fabulous series!!There is so much to appreciate here across all three books. This final installment came out a nose head of the others because the conclusion was lovely & terrible & extremely fitting.It's so weird to me that I actually came to love & appreciate all of these characters to this extent. They are irresistible in their own defective sort of way.To put it frankly, they're a bunch of elitist asshats, flawed to the bone, and it's arguable that none of t...

Strangely enough, I worked through all of my reservations from the previous two books, having liked the first book well enough, and on reflection liking the second one much less, I discovered that passing the hump of the heist in the third allowed me to finally relax into the story after finally realizing that Quentin wasn't going to remain a douchebag forever.The heist was fine, as far as that went, and his just going along with everything and sliding along with his life was par for course. It

I don’t know. Maybe it’s me fighting a book slump. Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾

*** 4 ***A buddy read with the Wednesday UF group... "..."“It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.” ..." Isn't that the truth!!! If I ever feel uncomfortable in a strange place, as long as I see books around I know I will be OK:):):) If one thing is true about this series it is that the writing is flawless! Nothing is to much or to little. The characters are exactly as the author intended for us to perceive them. Their actions are ev...

5 starsbrilliant and witty writing the dark side of all your childhood favorite fantasy storiesA wonderful conclusion to this really fantastic series

For being a genre-fusing deconstruction of the fantasy novel, this sure had me on the edge on my seat.It all started with teenage Quentin Coldwater attending a magical school, finding out the fantasy land from his favorite novels was real and then journeying there. Following various quests and a whole lotta heartbreak, Quentin is back in the real world and gives himself a very personal mission to complete even while his friends back in Fillory learn that the end of that world is very nigh.Quenti...

Warning: spoilers to follow!Perplexed. That’s how this series left me. I’m still not really sure what to make of it. Don’t get me wrong—the ultimate impression is a positive one. But, not unlike clichéd and stupid Facebook statuses, it’s complicated. The Magicians left me depressed and flummoxed, but intrigued. It was the other side of the Harry Potter/Charlie Bucket coin—kid gets golden ticket, only golden ticket turns out to royally screw up one’s psyche. It was the Watchmen spin on the tried-...

Growing up, we didn't have lots of money and my dad took off with most of what we did have anyway, but I was always told to do well in school, so I did. I was told, "go to college," so I did. (In fact, it was more assumed than outright spoken to be honest). Once I'd made the mistake of majoring in social science (Economics!), the only solution was more school!So I went on to law school. After three miserable years in a system that only rewards the "top 10", I graduated ...And then what? Then the...

Not gonna lie...this is how I feel about this novel:12/8/13: I keep looking at this hoping for a definite release date. Alas, nothing yet. But I'll keep on keeping on until then...Now I'm taunted with a cover.1/9/14: August 5th, 2014 ladies and gentlemen!!! Great early birthday present! Only 7 more months...And we get a summary! Great belated Christmas present :)8/2/14: AMAZING!!! Review to come ASAP!10/10/14: Finally, full review is here! Also published at The Founding Fields!Lady Salvatore got...

so I'll just get this out of the way: the almost entirely shitty and stupid SyFy network adaptation of this series has certainly made me better appreciate Grossman's mastery of storytelling and the uniqueness of his vision. ugh, that show. it is doing everything wrong! except for those two short scenes featuring the Beast.ANYWAYI think what often gets ignored in the rush to discuss Grossman's snarky repositioning of Harry Potter and Narnia-esque tropes and images into a poison pen letter sent fr...

This book was really in two parts. The first being a heist plot to recover a briefcase with mysterious contents.The second is about the death of the magical land, Fillory.Plot-wise and writing, I really enjoyed this novel. The author has a way of balancing tongue in cheek humor with introspection. You can tell he really thought about the engine of how magic worked in his novels, often borrowing from quantum physics for explanations. But that's only how it works on Earth; in Fillory it's all up f...

December 2021: Still five stars. Love this book. September 2015: "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 wil...

Warning: Mild (ish) spoilers for the first 2 booksI like the way Grossman tells stories. I mean, none of the books in this trilogy are told in the same way, which just gave it a little extra sumpin-sumpin, in my opinion.In the first one, everything plods along in this somewhat linear way with Quentin first discovering magic is real, moving through his education at the magical Brakebills, then finding out Fillory is real, which leads to losing everything and giving up magic, and finally (in a cli...

Well that was . . . disappointing. Which is a funny thing to say about a book written as well as this one, and that made me as happy as this one did at certain points (really, I would read hundreds of pages about the magic in this universe and how it works and doesn't, no plot required).The thing is, this book doubled down. The series as a whole has been playing with coming of age narratives and coming into power narratives, trying out different ones, contrasting them, complicating them. And the...

By now, I know what to expect when I start a book in Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy. There will be extensive, immersive world-building (Grossman is at his best when he is taking genuine joy from creating his own Narnia- or Hogwarts-like world, rather than trying to smugly point out all of their respective flaws), Quentin will stay just on the bearable side of utterly insufferable, there will be at least one character who I wish had an entire book of their own, and the last hundred pages of...

This book was totally not bad. I really enjoyed some parts of this book. Some of the things Grossman was trying to do really came together in this book. There. Did I damn it enough with faint praise? I’m sorry. Kinda. I just really wanted this to be something…else? More? I dunno. I just think Grossman didn’t really deliver what I wanted…though I am totally willing to admit that I am perhaps holding him to unfair expectations. I guess I just wanted a little more bang than whimper in my conclusion...

”Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming tha...

The Magicians #3: Quentin is on the outs and is back on Earth, he has nowhere to go, so thus has only one place to go, back to Brakebills! An almost fitting end to this absorbingly original trilogy as are cast slowly begins to realise how much is at stake this time round, and that maybe all of them are needed to save the world... all of them! Another almost rambling read as I have to follow characters on Earth and in Fillory has they head towards what might be the same goal. If anything, the mor...

I don't think I have read a series that has as much character development as in The Magicians trilogy. It was such a pleasure going on this journey with Quentin and his friends through these three books. Seeing Quentin grow up in these three books has come at the perfect time in my life. The themes of this book, and its predecessors, are so relevant to my life. Thank you, Lev Grossman, for writing something that resonates so deeply with people who grew up in books, in fantasy worlds, and are off...