The Magician King- Lev Grossman

The Magician King- Lev Grossman

Provenance: eArc received from Netgalley
Why I read it: I liked the Magicians a lot

The Magician King, the sequel to one of my surprise favorites of 2009 (I had no idea what to expect and ended up reading the entire book before/during a flight from Seattle to San Diego), is fantasy for the iPhone-addicted, prescription-ridden, BA-slugging lost generation who still await their letter from Hogwarts, hoping it might rescue them from the economic apocalypse, or at least from their parents' couch.

The Magician King picks up not quite where we left off, but similar enough in tone for the reader to possibly go “Oh my god, shut up Quentin.”After the first chapter, Quentin not only markedly improves, but we also get to hear from Julia, whose anti-Brakebills magical education is far more interesting. If you found Quentin highly abrasive and too hedonistic in the first book, now he only partakes in the occasional inebriation and is frankly, nearly celibate. While sling shoting through the magical and real world, the novel never quite achieves the epic fantasy sense or traps the action in a city enough to be urban fantasy (thankfully?), but notable side characters make reappearances and the whole wide magical world gets quite a bit bigger. Furthermore, something my brother brought up in regards to Harry Potter (we may have gotten into a large debate over the series and our rapidly decreasing willingness to “buy” the world which nearly descended into fisticuffs in from of ABC Family's constant replay of the first few films) is somewhat played for plot—that how you do a spell, who does the spell, and so on, has a marked effect on the efficiency and effectiveness of magic. Woo!

Also, as a semi-professional cartographer, my favorite character was Benedict, who pretty much gets brought along as Quentin’s entertainment/improvement project until he finds someone who REALLY needs his help. See: Julia’s secondary plot. Benedict attempts to be an awesome mapmaker, in the face of many scientific hurtles, such as a potentially non-spherical world (which would throw a wrench, or shall we say, level in the plan, because how would you determine latitude by angle of the sun if this wasn’t something that happened, and since Fillory lacks mechanically, no chronometer for longitude! Woo!) Poor Benedict.

Julia is not only the one who got away, but the one was cast out, who didn’t get into the elite college, who had to determine things on her own. Overall, the book's strongest points are avoiding Quentin's more annoying side, which I have seen blamed 10! times for people not finishing the previous book everywhere from io9 to Westeros (and yes, I may have ended up arguing somewhat with them, I am a bit of a Grossman fangirl, though the copy I got signed was for a friend who loved, loved the first book. Loved, loved).

I highly recommend this book and it is on my top 10 list for this year, out of the 130 or so books I have read, and probably higher if we're only counting those actually published in 2011.

Currently reading: Briarpatch- Tim Pratt (Spoilers: I LOVE IT), The Writer's Tale (Spoilers: For all of Doctor Who!), Tanya Huff's Blood Lines series (Spoilers: I read vampire books)