(This is the sequel to The Magicians and it’s basically impossible to talk about without mentioning some key plot points/spoilers from the first book. So if you don’t want to see those, stop reading now.)
At the end of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater changes his mind about giving up magic entirely, about resigning himself to an entirely ordinary existence on Earth, about never seeing the magic land of Fillory again. Magic is in him and part of him, and he can’t pretend it isn’t: he doesn’t really want to, and anyhow, his friends won’t let him. So Quentin, with Eliot and Janet and Julia—who is apparently quite skilled for a magician who’s never been to proper magic school—heads back to Fillory, where the four of them will reign as kings and queens. Which is beyond exciting, for a while, but then Quentin gets dissatisfied, because he’s the sort of person who’s never not dissatisfied for very long, and he decides that he needs something to do. So he volunteers himself for a tax-collecting mission to one of the islands off Fillory’s coast, with Julia to keep him company, but the tax-collecting mission shifts and turns into something else: a quest for seven magical keys that will … do something, surely, though no one’s initially certain what.
So Quentin and the others go in search of the keys, and it’s a funny kind of quest story, a not-entirely satisfying kind of quest story, like the quest in The Magicians wasn’t entirely satisfying, because it’s not as straightforward a thing as Quentin wants it to be. There are roadblocks and weird detours; at one point, early on, Quentin and Julia find themselves magicked out of Fillory entirely, back to Earth, and they’ve got no idea how they’ll get back. Some characters from the first book make appearances, and new characters are introduced. And alternating with Quentin’s story we get Julia’s: we get to see what’s happened to her and where she’s been, how she learned her magic, the kinds of places she frequented while Quentin was studying at Brakebills.
Maybe in part because I re-read The Magicians right before reading this book, I found myself reading quickly and really enjoying myself: I’d been immersed in this book’s worlds recently already, and now I was getting to see more of them. And parts of Fillory are great: I loved one character’s descriptions of the places they found while sailing: a freight train that came up from and disappeared back into the ocean, a floating castle perched on barges, an island where “the people were really waves, ocean waves,” a place where the ocean narrows and is channeled like an aqueduct (226). I found myself occasionally annoyed by some of the style/tone: for most of the book, Julia doesn’t really use contractions; there’s too much self-consciously now-ish things about the real-world pieces of the story (Android vs. iPhone, use of the word “nomming,” as in, a creature that lives “in the salt bogs of the Camargue, nomming the occasional wild horse to stay alive” (327), online dialogue complete with typos) … but for the most part, I was willing to overlook my quibbles and enjoy the story.
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