•       •       •

Though it isn’t perfect, I really enjoyed The Magician’s Land. Lev Grossman follows up his first two novels—The Magicians and The Magician King—with his third and seemingly final foray into Fillory, at least with this crew.

With the end of the magical land of Fillory nigh, Elliot, Janet, and crew must do everything within their power to stop it. Meanwhile, Quentin is back on Earth teaching at Brakebills trying to move on with his life, but Fillory isn’t done with him.

If you liked the earlier books in the trilogy, you’ll like this one. Enough said.

This is the first of the three novels to not have something terrible done to one of its main characters. Alice and Julia had horrible experiences in the first and second novels, respectively. I surmised Poppy was going to have an equally horrible fate in the third, but I was wrong. She actually has a rather pleasant story. Janet shares a memory that is fairly heart-wrenching, but that’s it, thankfully.

Alice makes a return, and we’re able to close the chapter on her story. Her storyline felt a little forced, but I can overlook it.

Julia makes a return for a brief moment.

Throughout Grossman’s trilogy, the second thing that bothered me (other than female trauma) was the character cameos. On one hand, it’s cool to see Penny and how far he’s come since the last book, but we’re only catching glimpses and left to determine what he had to go through to get there. Then they show up and do something wonderful to help further the story, then disappear again. I’m not knocking him too hard for this because I appreciate the abridged version of certain lives to give room for others to shine, but much like how Quentin is never the hero, it feels like we’re always looking in the opposite direction while the real heroes flew by.

That said, Quentin does finally have a hero arc in this novel.

I suppose, much like real life, we all live in the mundane sometimes while the real main characters do cool shit. Sometimes, they help us in our mundane tasks, then leave to do more cool shit. At some point, we manage to do cool shit too.

•       •       •

•       •       •