Netgalley mini-reviews: The Lauras and Warp

In the middle of the night, Alex's mother decides it is time for a road trip. The two of them head across the country to find people from Ma's past. As they travel, Ma tells Alex about her life and they stop for a while to see someone or earn enough money to keep going. Their journey will bring the two closer together and push them apart, as they decide how they want to live the rest of their lives.

The Lauras is a very unique story. Taylor's debut novel The Shore did some creative things with storytelling as well. But The Lauras can be a difficult book to read; Alex is coming to terms with their sexuality and complicated family and Ma is trying to find peace with a painful past. At certain parts, this book seems to be an ode to human resiliency, but it never becomes trite. I didn't adore this book in the way that I loved her previous one, but Sara Taylor is an inventive and talented writer and I will be interested to see what she does next.

The Lauras
By Sara Taylor
Hogarth Press August 2017
304 pages
Read via Netgalley

Hollis has graduated from college and now lives a listless life. He and his friends wander through their days at meaningless jobs and wonder what happened to their dreams. Hollis and his friend decide that the best way to spend their weekend is to break into an abandoned mansion, get drunk, and talk about the people they know and the people they wish they could be.

This book was republished after the success of Grossman's Magicians Trilogy. Hollis is very clearly an early iteration of Quentin Coldwater. It's a really good thing that Quentin became a magician because without magic, the moody twenty-something protagonist is painful to witness. There's an inevitable comparison here to Holden Caulfield. If you are a fan of that character, this might be a good read for you. The rest of us should probably stick to Grossman's more magical books.

Warp
By Lev Grossman
St. Martin's Griffin September 2016
192 pages
Read via Netgalley

Review: The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land

By Lev Grossman

Viking August 2014

401 pages

ARC won from Goodreads and the publisher

This is the third book in a trilogy. This review may contain spoilers for The Magicians and The Magician King. 


Quentin has hit a new low. He was banished from his beloved kingdom of Fillory and left behind being king and all of his closest friends. Out of options, Quentin returns to Brakebills, his alma mater, and works as a teacher. But his past soon catches up with him and he finds himself out on his own yet again. Meanwhile in Fillory, Janet and Eliot find their kingdom threatened by invaders and the very real possibility of apocalypse. 

I had some trouble getting into this story but I realize that the problem is self-made. If you have followed along with Quentin, Janet, Julia, and Eliot since the beginning, I would advise that you read through the first two books again before embarking on this newest adventure. It was hard for me to get back into this world and remember what the characters had been through since it's been a year and a half since I read the second book and much longer since I read the first.

While this series is wildly fantastical, each book has important insight into growing up. In this book, Quentin finds himself in places he never imagined he would be. He was a king, after all. Instead of ruling, he finds himself fighting for what basically amounts to being a part of a magical heist. This part of the story will certainly ring true for people who did all of the right things - college degrees, internships, networking; but still found themselves scrambling for jobs at the bottom of the food chain. We begin the story at this moment and work both backwards and forward.

One of Grossman's most interesting touches in The Magician's Land is his introduction of new characters in the last book of a series. Many writers would focus on their already established characters in the conclusion of their trilogy, but the new characters here really add to the story. Plum in particular sheds new light on characters that we already know and love. She  is a fellow magician who works with Quentin on the heist and we eventually learn that the two of them have already met under very interesting circumstances. Grossman uses the relationship between the two to show how far Quentin has come and the differences between youth (Plum) and the beginnings of maturity (Quentin). Watching the pair work as colleagues and become friends is one of the best parts of the story.

As Fillory faces the threat of destruction, Quentin encounters someone from his past who he thought was gone forever. As he tries to convince this person to embrace life again, there are striking parallels to loving someone with addictions who fights you every step of the way. Both in our world and in Fillory, the friends must decide what to fight for and what can be repaired. Part of growing up, after all, is deciding what to hold on to. Which relationships do we keep, no matter what, and what dreams do we let go with time?

While The Magicians paralleled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the sequel paid homage to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book has some serious parallels with The Last Battle. Lev Grossman has created an incredible trilogy. He has crafted characters who experience great joy and tremendous loss, entire lands filled to the brim with magic, and a set of stories that manage to be both literary and the best kind of fantasy simultaneously. You don't want to miss reading this series. 

Review: The Magician King

The Magician King

By Lev Grossman

Viking Press 2011

400 pages

From the library

Spoiler Alert: There is actually no way to discuss this book without spoilers. If you haven't read The Magicians, I'm about to tell you everything....

In this sequel to The Magicians, Quentin and his friends seem to have found some sort of peace. Their days are filled with a sort of meandering nothing that is expected of the kings and queens of Fillory. But Quentin finds himself ever unsatisfied, wondering if there is something between the mind-numbing boredom of being the ruler of a peaceful kingdom and the violent havoc that is a result of a kingdom at war. When he hears of a small island that hasn't paid their taxes for years, he decides to embark on a quest to find out why. His quest, like all quests, becomes much more complicated and adventure-filled than Quentin could have ever imagined.

While Quentin begins as the narrator of this story, it mostly belongs to Julia - the dark, unstable queen of Fillory who was denied entrance to Brakebills, the prestigious magic school that shaped Quentin and the other rulers. Through this book, we discover how she learned magic and visit the shadowy corners of the world where magic is unregulated. There is some real tension throughout between Quentin, who basically had things handed to him as a result of his upper class education, and Julia, who had to fight for everything that she got, usually under terrible circumstances. While Quentin has had to deal with some tough stuff, Julia is forever the "other" - the one who didn't make it into the posh school, doesn't have the mentors or connections, and who looks at life through all of the baggage she carries with her. As with The Magicians, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn to our own lives, despite the lack of magic in our world. 

I appreciated that Quentin seemed to mature from the previous book to this one. He is still somewhat selfish, but we can see a new side of him where he truly thinks about the feelings of others. While he is still trying to figure out what he wants from life and what will make him happy, he is less whiny and seems to have realized that he is not the only one who has problems in life. He serves as a good foil to Julia's character as the narrative switches between their present and Julia's past. In the present, Julia is difficult to like or understand. She holds herself at such a distance from the reader and the other characters. But as we read more of her back story, her bizarre behavior starts to make sense. 

The Magician King still gives plenty of love to your favorite fantasy series, including Lord of the Rings and Narnia.  In fact, the opening scene when the kings and queens go on a hunt is extremely reminiscent of the Pevensie children looking for that white stag. Oh, and then they go on a quest to find an island - can we say Voyage of the Dawn Treader? But Fillory is a much different world from Narnia and this book is worlds away from C.S. Lewis' series. The Magician King is delightfully dark. Grossman makes humor dark and can make the darkest plot points funny. 

"Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had a psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was attempting to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders. It would definitely do."

The Magician King is a dark and funny re-imagining of the fantasy stories you loved as a child. Grossman builds upon his magical world with lots of unexpected twists and turns. If you enjoyed The Magicians, you won't want to miss engaging tale.


You can read my review of The Magicians here. The third book, The Magician's Land should be out in early 2014.

Review: The Magicians

The Magicians

By Lev Grossman

Viking 2009

402 pages

From my to-be-read shelf

Quentin Coldwater should be a happy kid. But he is waiting for something big to happen, something that will make his rather ordinary life extraordinary. So as he waits to finish high school and go to Princeton, he learns magic tricks and rereads his favorite childhood books that take him to the magic land of Fillory. When he travels through a portal to Brakebills, a college for the study of magic, he thinks that life is finally about to get good. But magic doesn't solve every problem and sometimes, it creates new ones.

Many people claim that this book is a darker, more grown-up Harry Potter. But for me, they just happen to be two books that involve young magicians. I think the difference is that Harry Potter is about a fight between good and evil. The lines are clearly delineated (well, maybe not for you, Snape) and you know that good must prevail regardless of the cost. In The Magicians, everything is grey. Normal people and magical people have faults and make mistakes and don't know who they are supposed to be or what will make them content with their lives. The contrast is really strong between the ambiguity of Quentin's life and the way he perceives the characters in Fillory to be good or bad.

While this book may seem to be specifically for and about college-aged readers, I think there is something very universal in Quentin's expectations and experiences. Each one of us believe that we would be happy if - if we got a promotion, lost 20 pounds, got married, or got our book published. All magic aside, this is Quentin's realization that the things he thought would make him happy - magic, love, Fillory itself - are not enough to make him content with his life.

"Here he was, a freshly licensed and bonded and accredited magician. He had learned to cast spells, seen the Beast and lived, flown to Antarctica on his own two wings, and returned naked by the sheer force of his magical will. He had an iron demon in his back. Who would ever have thought he could do and have and be all those things and still feel nothing at all? What was he missing? Or was it him? If he wasn't happy even here, even now, did the flaw lie in him? As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know."

Mr. Grossman is obviously paying a thinly veiled and very loving homage to the land of Narnia and its creator, C.S. Lewis. Fillory is a magical land inhabited by magical creatures which is often rescued by a group of siblings who are summoned when there is trouble and sent back home when peace reigns again. As someone who loves those books, I really enjoyed this and can imagine myself going back through the book again to discover more of the allusions to Narnia.

I found this book to drag and be uneven in some places, but ultimately I thought it was an excellent look at the way the things we think will save us can actually damage us instead. I appreciated the way that magic did not fix all problems - magic is hard to learn, hard to practice, and creates its own special class of problems. And yet we are still captivated by magic. C.S Lewis was, Lev Grossman is, and we are as we continue to read books and watch movies where the characters can do things we can only imagine. I will definitely be picking up the second book to find out what happens to Quentin and Fillory.