The Magician King

4.5 *.......excellent book. Julia's story was especially compelling and it was good to see Quentin mature.

Good one

Son of a...

Let's start with The Magicians. At the time, I thought it was “okay” - being a fan of series like Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc., I had a difficult time merging new-age teenage sullenness - no matter how true-to-life - with my idea of those playful, magical fantasy worlds established elsewhere. That said, I thought The Magicians explored some very interesting themes: disillusionment with one's current status/life/the state of the universe, the adolescent feeling of invincibility that comes with college life, the somewhat stagnant realization that life-after-college isn't all its cracked up to be (even when infused with magic), etc.

I picked up The Magician King because there was enough in the first book to interest me. I wasn't expecting a lot, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Boy, did this book catch me off guard. It was good. It was very good (much, much better than I'd expected).

Quentin, the main character, has landed on top of the magical world: he's the king of Fillory, the fantasy land that he's idolized his entire life. However, even after gaining everything he ever wanted, he's bored. He needs some sort of quest because, after all, that's what every fantasy hero needs (and no one knows that cliche - and that it is a cliche - better than Quentin). So, along with his fellow King (Eliot) and Queens (Janet and Julia), our hero sets off to find his adventure.

What follows is a multi-layered tapestry of discovery, adventure, pain, suffering loss, disbelief, love, and destiny. The story bobs and weaves between time and space, switching between the present story of Quentin's adventures, the past story of Julia's transformation from Stanford-bound know-it-all to power-hungry hedge witch, and the strange, heart-wrenching thread that ties these two plotlines together.

I loved this book. However, let's go back to that first sentence. I won't spoil it, but the story's ending is a sure-as-shootin' cliffhanger. It's okay - even exciting - that Lev Grossman plans to write a third novel in this series; however, this book ends too quickly and quirkily, as if Grossman needed to stop before he wove his third time into this one.

Oh well. Minor quibble. The Magician King (and, truly, this whole series) is flawed, yes, but so is the reality it describe: our reality. These books speak to the deep part of us that, like Quentin, wishes magic could solve the world's problems. Give this one (and its a predecessor, if you haven't already) a shot.

3.5 on a good day , still some odd scenes but apart from that it was a bit better

Unlike the first book, The Magician King has a very clearly defined plot and the pacing issues in The Magicians were solved. Quentin's story was great, but I found Julia's story fascinating. It started to feel a little long towards the end, but overall I really enjoyed it.

My rating on this may be a bit generous... Call it a 3.5. At first, I was really enjoying this book and watching Quentin grow into an actual human character. I know a lot of people hate him, but I understood a bit about why he had the attitude he had. It made a lot of sense for the academia that surrounded the first book. The sequel is much more about life after academia, about why “what happens next, when does my life start?” part of life. Quentin begins to think outside himself for the first time... ever, I think. I like his journey. I like Julia's journey. I would've liked a bit more of Eliot, but that's a personal thing.

The first book had an ending that pushed me forward. It faked out at a lame, boring ending, and then pulled you right back to the cliff's edge. The Magician King starts you off at the cliff's edge, and then drags you back to safe ground. I felt pretty dissatisfied by the whole last chapter. Every time something cool was about to happen, someone would prevent it. Not really sure why Grossman made that choice. There's definitely potential for a third book, and I do hope he writes one (The Magician Monk?), but this ending doesn't leave me excited about it like the first one did.

I found the first book in the series to be a little unfulfilling, however the sequel did a great deal to expand the world and develop the main character. I enjoyed it a great deal and found it more enjoyable. Looking forward to the third installment.

4,5 stars, I guess.

I swear I need to push my best friend into reading this to be able to decide if I'm seriously broken and that's why I love this. It's weird, because I usually don't like too depressing books, but something about this was right up my alley.

So our little depressing quest continues with the kids (minus Josh) go back to Fillory to become kings and queens. But of course it's not that easy, someone actually fucked up big time and now gods are about to take magic away from humans. You can't let that happen, can you? Quentin needs to save the world this time, or at least the world he loves.

I have to be honest, not sure why I liked the characters more; because I developed some kind of a fondness for them, as you get used to your mean, old, horrible cat and start to love him? Or maybe they were a bit less dickish, because they actually needed to do things, instead of just sitting around, being witty and getting drunk. Not having Janet around all that much helped as well, as I think she's the least likeable of all the Brakebills. The others have redeeming qualities (Eliot dishes out the best lines), but she's just too spoilt and too... like someone I used to know. My bad?

We also go back and get some explanations about Julia, alternating with the chapters of Quentin being on adventure. I generally really like this kind of a thing, it just makes me more likely to keep reading, which doesn't help with sleeping, but at this point I'm okay with that. Julia is not my favourite, though, I don't really care about her, but this was neat, still.
Now I just want them to do the same with Penny. I love him so much and he's still alive!!!! Surprise, motherfucker. I love it. Yes, Quentin hates his guts, but suck it up man, Penny is awesome.

The end was a bit frustrating, not gonna lie. I understand why Quentin did what he did, he is actually developing into a person much more empathic and a real king worth the name, but at the same time it feels like we keep taking steps backs. But hey, we still have one more book and I'm sure Mr. Grossman filled it with something.

All in all, I was definitely impressed with this one and I'm picking up the last one soon enough. I still need something to read in between, especially because I'm going on a little mini holiday and this just doesn't feel like a holiday read. I want to savour it or something. I don'‘t have much else to say about it, honestly, so lets just leave it at that for now.

So long and long live the Kings. And the Queens. (Shit, so much royalty.)

great overall book

Bien meilleur que le premier, on découvre enfin le côté magique, une galerie de personnages beaucoup plus importante et enfin l'histoire de Julia. Je suis content de m'être accroché au delà du premier tome !

The more I read of Lev Grossman's Magicians the more I like them. I'm dying to see where Quentin goes next. I was a huge fan of CS Lewis growing up, and Grossman's weaving of Lewis allusion, geeky references to code, hackers, comics, and fantasy lore really entertains me. I also love his ability to create a traditional fantasy world that has characters that act real and curse and wonder the same things I would wonder about how things would really go down if I were to end up in Narnia... or in this case Fillory.

I'm glad Q wasn't as whiny in this one. I'm glad to see some growth in his character. I felt bad for Julia, but she did get what she needed in the end.

Executive Summary: A few minor complaints, but overall another enjoyable entry in this series, and far less depressing. If you enjoyed the second half of [b:The Magicians 6101718 The Magicians (The Magicians, #1) Lev Grossman https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1313772941s/6101718.jpg 6278977], you'll likely enjoy this.Audio book: Mark Bramhall once again does an excellent job narrating, making this a perfect choice to do in audio. Great inflection, and pretty good accents.Full ReviewThis one started a bit slow for me. I wasn't really sure where it was going to go. Once it got going, it didn't slow down again.I think my favorite part of this book was the flashbacks catching us up on what Julie had been up to during the first book. I really like her alternate to Breakbills. It gave me a bit of that “magic school” trope that I love so much despite being essentially the complete opposite.Once again though I think Mr. Grossman takes this a bit too far for a sense of realism or something? Some details of the story would have been better off edited out as far as I'm concerned. I don't feel like they added anything to the story, but that sense of gloomy malaise that bothered me in the first book.Thankfully it's not nearly as constant or as thick. I think Quinton is much more likable in this book than the first. Or at least as likable as he was in the first half of that book. He does seem to have grown up a bit, and be a little less mopey. He still struggles to be happy throughout though.I really like the world building here. I would have liked more detail on things. We still don't really get a good explanation on magic as I prefer. We do get some more background on the universe and magic though.I generally found this book more fun than the first, though I wouldn't go so far as to call this a fun book. This series has definitely gone a different direction than I originally expected from this series, but that's not a bad thing.I'll be curious to see things where Mr. Grossman takes things for the final book of the series.

I'm going to be including a bit of discussion about The Magicians, the predecessor to this book, during this review. I am assuming that anyone reading the sequel has read the first volume, such that that discussion will not constitute spoilers for anyone.
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Not sure I know what I think of this one. It's the followup to the widely acclaimed (but polarizing) The Magicians, which to me was an exercise in genre subversion. I thought the first book did a lot of interesting things, but I also found it depressing.

Before I go on, I should add that I probably don't have the appropriate literary grounding and my opinions should likely be disregarded. I am reliably informed that The Magician King is designed to directly parallel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis' third Narnia book, which I haven't read as I didn't like the first one as a kid. So it's quite possible that I'm missing important allusions that would make it more akin to the first book.

The Magician King takes place some time after the end of The Magicians, with Quentin and his friends ruling over Fillory. It's split into two different perspectives: Quentin's, in the present, and Julia's, in a retelling of how she learned to do magic without attending Brakebills. Both have their high points; Julia's was the more interesting to me for much of the book.

Magicians seemed determined to hammer home the idea that life isn't a fairy tale and things aren't always fair and don't always work out well. Some of that tone is left in King, but a number of the sharp edges have been sanded off.

Immediately after reading it, I felt I “enjoyed” The Magician King more than its predecessor – I found The Magicians quite depressing – but that The Magicians was the book that did more interesting things. After sleeping on it, I'm not sure that's fair, as King still does plenty of heavy lifting; it's probably impossible for it to make as strong an impression as the first book, since its assault on the genre is already known.

This book was much improved over the first ([b:The Magicians 6101718 The Magicians Lev Grossman http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313772941s/6101718.jpg 6278977]) by moving away from solely following the story of Quentin. In the first story he moped the whole way through even as he was granted whatever he wanted, time after time. This time out, we still follow Quentin in the present but are given the story of Julia in alternating chapter flashbacks which truly create the backbone of the story. Julia is a much better formed character than Quentin and she doesn't make the nonsense life choices that plague Quentin's arc. I'm sure that there's probably another book on the way to tell us more about how Quentin will continue to pout his way through life, being handed everything he wants on a silver platter and finding it all wanting. Unless he becomes a changed character following the final scenes from The Magician King it will fall back to the bland story arc that marred the first book.

Magic. Just magic.

A great sequel to a great book. Heartbreaking, heartwarming, funny, fun, horrifying, tragic.

What more could you ask for?

I think it had been too long since I read The Magicians? I had the sense that it was frequently alluding to things that I didn't really remember, but also I'm pretty sure some of it was stuff that didn't actually happen in the first book? So that was a little confusing. Still, this kept me turning the pages. It had a lot of depth to it.

***

I re-read this shortly after re-reading The Magicians (but after reading the Magician's Land) and I think it's reallly enhanced by reading them all closely together.

Also in reading everyone else's GoodReads reviews it's clear to me that I like these books more than just about anyone I know. Hmm! Specifically a lot of people seem really down on Quentin, which I think is kind of the point of Quentin. (I mean, I get it, it's a fine line to walk with “unlikeable” characters and sometimes they can certainly turn me out of a narrative.)

Really enjoyed it. I think the claims of sexism were unfounded. But I am a man, so, who knows. The main female character, Julia, does go through a lot (a lot), but if anything that serves to highlight some of the worst of what women can experience in a male-dominated world. I think the same goes for some of Quentin's naïve misogyny – that's part of the story. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's being endorsed. Quentin is kind of a dick, we know this.

Anyway. Great adventure, great personality, great imagination, I really enjoyed this. Very readable as well.

A thought about the end contains vague spoilers:




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I guess I should've expected that sinking feeling as I read the ending – it'd been foreshadowed the whole time, and the last book was almost as bad, but the last book wasn't quite as bad (he still got to have a lot of what he wanted; really, the sacrifice was on Alice, not him) and I found myself swept up in the heroic adventure so when the ending came, I was disappointed. At the very least, I wanted (still want) to know what happens next. And (probably like Quentin) I'm still trying to figure out if there are any loopholes or ways to get to Fillory or the new world.

This was a novel and entertaining book until the second to last chapter which has ruined everything else in the story. And my life.

Books are, I've found, very much like people, in the sense that it's possible to feel some very strong emotions when it comes to them. It's possible to love a book blindly, for instance, ignoring all its flaws in favor of the things that one likes about it. It's also entirely possible to hate a book uncompromisingly, and just thinking about it can make one cringe or put one in a thoroughly bad mood. One can come to love a book one used to dislike, just as one can come to love someone over time, and the opposite is equally true: one can grow to dislike a book one used to love. Really, the only difference between books and people is that no one except oneself truly gets hurt when one picks up or puts away a book, and they will always be there to give one a second chance.

This is, in many ways, quite true with series. Though the broader story arc might link one book to another, many readers find that they grow to love a small number of books in particular, especially when the series is more than a trilogy. Harry Potter is my favorite example: of all the seven books, I am most enamored with The Goblet of Fire, while I could really live without The Order of the Phoenix. I know each is part of a whole, and I know that The Order of the Phoenix is just as important as The Goblet of Fire in the overall scheme of things, but I prefer The Goblet of Fire on the whole, mostly because it contains elements that I fell in love with about the Harry Potter series that I felt were lost in The Order of the Phoenix, or were at the very least muted. I understand that those elements had to be tossed out or put aside for the overall storyline, and I know doing so was necessary to furthering the development of the whole series, but favoring books, much like love, has a rationality all on its own.

The same goes for my relationship with characters. When I first read Lev Grossman's The Magicians I loved the whole thing: characters, plot, themes, everything. It was so well-written, so well-told, that I was riding on the high of the storytelling for quite a while. It was only later, when I started thinking about it more closely, that I came to realize that while I adored the novel as an overall package, there was quite a bit about it that I disliked - or rather, one person, in particular: Quentin Coldwater.

I should say that my relationship with Quentin is an ambivalent one. On one hand I love him as a character: he is quite realistic and human, and his mistakes are entirely human mistakes. In my review of The Magicians, I stated the novel is a version of Harry Potter and Narnia (but mostly Narnia) with all the idealism taken out of it, and in many ways Quentin is like the heroes of those novels with all the idealism but none of the will to get things done, always expecting things to happen to him when they he ought to be happening to the world.

But in many ways a character is an idea, something that one addresses as a reader entering a story and immersing oneself in it. When one begins to think of them as people, that's where my issues with Quentin arise. As a character, I like Quentin, but as a person, I came to absolutely hate his guts. If he had been narrating The Magicians in first person I don't think I would have gotten past the first few chapters, because when I thought about it he reminded me a lot of Holden Caulfield, and I really do not enjoy Caulfield's voice in the least. The minute he enters Brakebills he keeps expecting to become the hero of the story, to become Harry Potter or one of the Pevensie children, believing that his story is just around the corner. And he gets that story, all right - but at a steep, steep price.

It was because of this that I took my time getting to the next novel in the series, The Magician King. I knew that if I picked it up I would wind up reading about Quentin again, and I was still ticked off enough at him that I didn't want to run into him at all, if I could avoid it. I needed time to cool my head before I could so much as pick it up and read it. I might have liked the other characters, but Quentin was still the main character of the story, and I had to deal with him if I wanted to get through the novel. I was in no rush; the book would still be there to be read, after all, and I could get to it whenever I felt I was ready to look at Quentin's face again, so to speak.

It was Hope who finally nudged me into reading The Magician King. I had made plans to go into Jim C. Hines' Libriomancer, or maybe go back to proper epic fantasy with N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but Hope was insistent that I read The Magician King, allaying my apprehensions about having to live in Quentin's head again by saying that Julia would be co-narrating the novel. That was enough for me to set aside both Libriomancer and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and finally get me to pick up The Magician King.

Once again, Hope proved correct in her assessment of this novel, because The Magician King proved to be not only as good as The Magicians, but, to my mind, better. I attribute this to the fact that I don't have to spend so much time with Quentin anymore, but moreover to the fact that Quentin is actually a better person in this novel - somewhat, and mostly towards the end, but altogether he's not as irritating as he used to be.

The Magician King is an almost direct continuation of the events of The Magicians. Quentin is now a King of Fillory, along with his old Brakebills friends Eliot and Jane, and also, surprisingly, Julia. In the first book Julia had become a hedge witch, having picked up magic from somewhere, but since the first novel's told pretty much from Quentin's point of view, the reader has no idea how she came about her powers - powers that are strong enough, apparently, for her to become a Queen of Fillory right alongside the Brakebills kids, and strange enough to give said Brakebills kids the creeps. Quentin knows something's very wrong with Julia, but is unable to quite pinpoint what it is - at least until a new adventure starts for them in Fillory.

The novel is actually two stories: one is Quentin's adventure (though he would very much like to argue about that term), and the other is Julia's story about how she became what she is at the beginning of the novel. Of the two stories Quentin's is the most typical, the only difference being that Quentin isn't quite an idiot anymore - though to be quite honest I was very harsh with him in the first third of the book, carrying as I was all the biases I had from reading the previous novel. It was only a little later that I eased up on Quentin, and realized that he was aware of his mistakes and what they had done to not just Alice, but to Josh and Penny as well, and that while he regretted them, he was trying his best not to learn from his mistakes, and move on. There is still that sense of entitlement that he has, which comes to the fore when he learns that while he and Julia had been figuring a way to get back to Fillory after finding themselves trapped in the real world, Eliot had been on an adventure of the sort Quentin himself desperately wanted to have, but it's somewhat more muted now. He still isn't the sort of person I'd want to be friends with, but he's not as bad as he used to be.

Of course, my assessment of Quentin could be softer because he's no longer the only protagonist. He's no longer standing alone in the limelight, and so I can relax a bit when it comes to him because the other protagonist of this novel, Julia, has a story that is by far more interesting, and infinitely more heartbreaking, than Quentin's storyline is by a mile. Somewhere between Quentin finding out that Julia is a hedge witch in The Magicians and the beginning of The Magician King, Julia's powers increased more than a hundredfold - and it was the kind of power that Quentin and his fellow Brakebills graduates feared and respected. How she got there is told in parallel to Quentin's story in The Magician King, and it is, by far, more intriguing and more painful.

As a character, Julia is one of those I really like, but I also think a lot of people will find themselves turned off by her. Her storyline, as I said, is not the prettiest, nor is her attitude - some would call her incredibly selfish, but there are reasons for her selfishness, and her coldness, and her anger. She is motivated by all of those, yes, but at the same time she is determined, and methodical, and so very intelligent in ways that Quentin isn't. I suppose it's because she earned her way to her powers, whereas Quentin had everything handed to him on a silver platter over at Brakebills. Julia's school was much harder, much harsher, and while it's broken her, it's also rewarded her in ways that Brakebills didn't reward Quentin and his friends. Of course, the question becomes whether or not that was worth the price, but it takes reading the novel to determine for oneself whether or not that's true. And, I feel, that's the beauty of Julia's story, and the beauty of Grossman's writing of her story: there is no judgment save what the reader brings to the table.

Aside from Quentin and Julia, many of the familiar characters from The Magicians make an appearance. Eliot and Janet have already been mentioned, and Josh and Penny make their own appearances as well. Even Alice puts in appearances from time to time, in the form of Quentin's memories of her. But the most interesting character introduced in this new novel is Poppy, an Australian who's traveling around the world doing fieldwork for her thesis on dragons. Her dynamic with the original group is fascinating, not only because she's Josh's love interest, but also because she seems to make the most sense out of all of them in the story. She's the one who calls Quentin out when he complains about not having an adventure, asking him if his trip back to Earth to Julia might not his adventure after all. It might not have been the one he wanted, true, but it was the one he was best suited for. When she joins them in Fillory she also proves that she has one of the most level heads of them all, addressing things practically and as they come. She is in many ways the balance that Alice would probably have become had she survived the events of the last novel - or maybe not. It's difficult to speculate about the directions characters take in this novel, and that's when they're alive, never mind if they're dead.

If The Magicians had a somewhat narrow scope of the magical world, hinting only at the possibilities of magic beyond Brakebills and Fillory, The Magician King expands that world exponentially, presenting not only what lies beyond the horizons of magic on Earth, but in Fillory and the Neitherlands, as well. Julia's story showcases the world of hedge witches, those practitioners of magic considered dangerous or worse by those in Brakebills because they come into magic without the safety nets and systems afforded by the school to its students. It becomes clear that a lot of them aren't getting very far on their own, but Julia proves that that need not be the case. Without the limits imposed by Brakebills upon its students, hedge witches with enough determination and intelligence - both of which Julia has in spades - can gain access to magic the likes of which those in Brakebills can only speculate upon.

Now, to be fair, at no point is hedge magic shown to be superior to or weaker than Brakebills magic; it's just different, with a whole different set of pros and cons. Quentin paid his dues at Brakebills and in Fillory, and so did Julia - it's just that Julia's dues were paid in a different kind of currency from Quentin's. Some people might say that Julia paid much too high a price for her power, but that's something only the reader can decide for himself or herself.

Aside from the world of hedge magic, there's also the Neitherlands, where a great catastrophe has occurred and, by the end of the novel, been slowed down, at least. This is where the groundwork for the next novel is laid. It's become quite obvious that Quentin is following the Hero's Journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell. In The Magicians, it's about his trial, about proving himself worthy to be the hero. The Magician King is about his main quest. By the end of the novel, given the events that happen, it becomes clear that Quentin, now a hero, has to go home - and no, it's not Fillory. That point of his journey is over. I speculate that the third book will be about Quentin going home and dying - maybe a physical death, but more likely a metaphorical one. Heroes can die and live forever in legend, as Achilles did, but not all heroes go that way. Sometimes, they become gods.

But that's for the third book to show the reader: the groundwork has already been laid, both in Quentin's story in the Neitherlands and Julia's story about how she became who she was at the beginning of the novel. It'll take reading the third book - probably the last one, given how the arc is going - to see where Quentin finally ends up in all of this. Hopefully he finds what he's been looking for all along.

Overall, The Magician King is a more than worthy continuation of The Magicians, in many ways a whole lot better than the first book - a feat in the second book of a series, which generally tend to be as good as or (more often) worse than the first. As a story it stands up well, but it promises so much more to come in the third book of the series. Some stories that began in the first book are brought to a close here, but many, many more have been opened, and, given how carefully Grossman has balanced this series so far, they are bound to be explored and brought to a close in the next book. And this time, I know I'll pick it up as soon as it comes out. Quentin is more bearable now, after all.

Enjoyable followup to “The Magicians”. Not actually necessary to read first book if you just want to read this one which I thought was the more enjoyable of the two. Interwoven timeline works well as the flashbacks give you insight into current plot. Well written fantasy novel. I'm not a huge fantasy novel fan but this was good.

everyone is either an asshole or completely devoid of personality and that rape scene was 1000% unnecessary and far too detailed. no thank you.

Quentin Coldwater is a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He's the person that wins a trip to Italy and grumbles about it not being France. I read the other reviews of this book and, when I started book 1, I expected to find Quentin grating - but I found I liked him in both the first book and this one. He's the mopey friend you continue to hang out with.

In this installment, Quentin has everything he ever dreamed of. He's living the life of a king, yet he's restless. So he goes in search of the next big thing. This book also fills in Julia's story - I really enjoyed her backstory - as it is interwoven into Quentin's present story.

I enjoyed this one. It has moments of humor, yet it's also rather dark. I am a fan of the tv series - which bears only a passing resemblance to the books. I enjoyed seeing what bits were plucked out of this one for the first season.

I want this to be good, but it's really just ok. The problem for me is that Grossman has a good idea, interesting characters, a plot worth following–but writes unevenly enough that I'm confused as to what genre or audience he's aiming for some of the time.