Review: The Magician King: A Novel

The Magician King: A Novel by Lev Grossman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I won this book on GR give-away but hadn't read the first book yet so I had to go back and read that one first. And by read I mean listen to the audiobook on my 900 hour drive to North Texas a few weeks ago. So then I set in for this book.

I liked this book a lot more than the first book [b:The Magicians|6101718|The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)|Lev Grossman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313772941s/6101718.jpg|6278977], I feel like this book had so much more original content which was kinda my biggest complaint about the first book. I liked that the majority of this book was spent in Fillory and that it brought in some new characters and went back to some of the old as well. The ending was super depressing, but I think I would have felt cheated if it had been a happy ever after fairy tail since nothing else in these books every happened that way.

The main character Quentin is so hard to like, all he does is complain and nothing is ever good enough for him. At some time I felt like the author was trying to make his an unlikeable character and goodness he succeeded. He always thought he deserved more than he did. It's funny to have a main character that it's impossible to root for, but here one was. I feel like all the supporting characters except the ones who died were such better and more likable people.

But even still I really enjoyed this book. I really enjoyed going back and forth between the Quentin story and Julia's backstory, I would have loved to hear how Julia hooked up with the old gang from the first book, cause her story was actually very interesting. Like happened a lot in the first book it did seem to skip over some very important parts, but that's okay cause you could mostly fill in the gaps. Also like the first book the brutality of some of the scenes was intense- maybe I haven't read enough fantasy books but there are some brutal murders and sexual experiences that are just not right. But again it definitely separates itself from Harry Potter and the Narnia books.

I hope he writes another book about this, although I don't know if it should be about Quentin- I'd like to see what Bingle and Julia end up doing, or more about the FTB peeps.



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