The Magician's Land

May 12, 2014
Grossman’s final entry in the Magicians Trilogy (following The Magician King) brings Quentin Coldwater’s story to a satisfying conclusion. After Quentin is banished from his beloved magical land of Fillory and fired from the Brakebills school of magic, he joins a wizardly heist masterminded by a talking bird. The target: a relic from one of the first children to visit Fillory, whose adventures were immortalized in a series of Narnia-like children’s novels. During this mission, Quentin must confront his past mistakes and his role in the dying Fillory’s future. Just as Quentin achieves a new maturity, so Grossman’s trilogy becomes more than a sex-and-swearing satire of Harry Potter and Narnia. Grossman still can’t resist winking at his novels’ antecedents, as when a character uses the Harry Potter catchphrase “Mischief managed.” Though the tone is occasionally too ironic, and Quentin’s victories overly easy—such as a reconciliation with a key character from the first novel—this novel serves as an elegantly written third act to Quentin’s bildungsroman, in which he at last learns responsibility and to not simply put childish things aside but understand them—and himself—anew. Fans of the trilogy will be pleased at how neatly it all resolves. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME.

Deeply satisfying finale to the best-selling fantasy trilogy (The Magicians, 2009; The Magician King, 2011).After being dethroned and exiled from the magical kingdom of Fillory for helping his friend Julia become a demigoddess, Quentin returns to Earth to teach at his alma mater, Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. But when his student Plum stumbles across the school's resident malevolent demon, which Quentin refuses to kill because it was once his lover Alice, they're both thrown out and forced to take a risky freelance magic job. This involves stealing a suitcase that once belonged to Plum's great-grandfather Rupert, one of the five Chatwin siblings whose adventures in Fillory were the subject of best-selling books Plum thinks are fictional-until she opens the suitcase to find Rupert's memoirs. They fill in some blanks about what really happened to the Chatwins in Fillory and provide clues that will help Quentin's old comrades Eliot and Janet, still ruling over Fillory, who have been warned by the ram-god Ember that the land is slowly dying. As in the previous novels, Grossman captures the magic of fantasy books cherished in youth and repurposes it to decidedly adult ends. He slyly alludes to the Harry Potter series and owes a clear debt to J.K. Rowling's great action scenes, though his characters' magical battles have a bravura all their own. But his deepest engagement remains with C.S. Lewis, as Narnia is the obvious prototype for Fillory; the philosophical conclusion Grossman draws from his land's narrowly averted apocalypse is the exact opposite of that offered in Lewis' overbearing Christian allegory. Human emotions and desires balance unearthly powers, especially in the drama of Alice's painful return. A beautiful scene in Fillory's Drowned Garden reconnects Quentin with the innocent, dreaming boy he once was yet affirms the value of the chastened grown-up he has become.The essence of being a magician, as Quentin learns to define it, could easily serve as a thumbnail description of Grossman's art: "the power to enchant the world." COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2014
When he's not reviewing books for "Time", Grossman writes engrossing fantasy that has won him the 2011 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer from the World Science Fiction Society. Here's the conclusion to a trilogy that started off by sending Quentin Coldwater to Fillory, the magical land he thought existed only in his childhood books. Now he's back at Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic, having been expelled from Fillory, and with Brakebills undergraduate Plum goes on a mission that unearths old friends, new secrets, and a spell that could create a newer, better Fillory. In our dreams! With an eight-city tour.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2014
The third and concluding volume in Grossman's epic Magicians trilogy finds former High King Quentin ejected from the magical kingdom of Fillory and, in short order, given the boot from a too-brief teaching stint at his old alma mater, Brakebills. What is Quentin to do? At loose ends, he joins a ragtag group of magiciansincluding Plum, an expelled Brakebills studenton a quest to find a mysterious case, contents unknown but presumed to be invaluable. Meanwhile, it appears, amid intimations of apocalypse, that Fillory is coming to an end, and the novel's action begins bouncing back and forth between the kingdom and the real world, where Quentin and Plum are now living in a New York town house, with Quentin determined to use an arcane spell to create a new magician's land. At this point, Quentin's former inamorata Alice shows up; but wait! Isn't she dead? Hmm . . . there is much more to the story, but suffice it to say that it is endlessly fascinating and always proceeds apace. In sum, this is an absolutely brilliant fantasy filled with memorable charactersold and newand prodigious feats of imagination. At one point, Quentin muses, Magic and books: there aren't many things more important than that. The Magician's Land is ineffable proof of that claim. Fantasy fans will rejoice at its publication.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2014
Deeply satisfying finale to the best-selling fantasy trilogy (The Magicians, 2009; The Magician King, 2011).After being dethroned and exiled from the magical kingdom of Fillory for helping his friend Julia become a demigoddess, Quentin returns to Earth to teach at his alma mater, Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. But when his student Plum stumbles across the school's resident malevolent demon, which Quentin refuses to kill because it was once his lover Alice, they're both thrown out and forced to take a risky freelance magic job. This involves stealing a suitcase that once belonged to Plum's great-grandfather Rupert, one of the five Chatwin siblings whose adventures in Fillory were the subject of best-selling books Plum thinks are fictional-until she opens the suitcase to find Rupert's memoirs. They fill in some blanks about what really happened to the Chatwins in Fillory and provide clues that will help Quentin's old comrades Eliot and Janet, still ruling over Fillory, who have been warned by the ram-god Ember that the land is slowly dying. As in the previous novels, Grossman captures the magic of fantasy books cherished in youth and repurposes it to decidedly adult ends. He slyly alludes to the Harry Potter series and owes a clear debt to J.K. Rowling's great action scenes, though his characters' magical battles have a bravura all their own. But his deepest engagement remains with C.S. Lewis, as Narnia is the obvious prototype for Fillory; the philosophical conclusion Grossman draws from his land's narrowly averted apocalypse is the exact opposite of that offered in Lewis' overbearing Christian allegory. Human emotions and desires balance unearthly powers, especially in the drama of Alice's painful return. A beautiful scene in Fillory's Drowned Garden reconnects Quentin with the innocent, dreaming boy he once was yet affirms the value of the chastened grown-up he has become.The essence of being a magician, as Quentin learns to define it, could easily serve as a thumbnail description of Grossman's art: "the power to enchant the world."

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 15, 2014

Banished from the magical land of Fillory at the end of 2011's The Magician King, Quentin Coldwater plans to settle into a quiet life teaching at his magical alma mater, Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. His past is not so easily set aside, however, and when he is drawn into a shadowy conspiracy to steal an object that cannot be stolen, of course, it all leads back to his homeland. Quentin will need to seek out former mentors, old friends, and even his lost love if he is going to achieve his goals and save his kingdom. VERDICT From the trilogy's beginnings as a coming-of-age story, it is perhaps inevitable that Quentin will finally have to grow into his own as the series closes. Luckily that doesn't mean we don't get to spend quality time in the marvelous land of make-believe made real, Fillory. While Grossman consciously leans heavily on Narnia and Hogwarts to create a frame of reference, this series taken as a whole brings new life and energy to the fantasy genre. The final volume will please fans looking for action, emotion, and, ultimately, closure. [See Prepub Alert, 2/10/14.]

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.