![sequel to the magicians land sequel to the magicians land](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61zOuY1WrAL.jpg)
Discovering that there is so much more to you as well that as an adult, you have the privilege and the responsibility to make choices and take action.Īnd, of course, love. The type of learning that only comes with experience, and mistakes, and discovering that there is so much more to the world than anyone ever showed you. It’s learning that you have inside you what it takes to be an adult. The latter half of that sentence, to save the kingdom, is irrelevant. The concept of you have inside you what it takes, for example, is something I’m only beginning to understand now that Quentin and I are both in our 30s. The reason why they’re real, even when they’re not real. The best part of The Magician’s Land is that Grossman manages to take the hoariest of clichés - you have inside you what it takes to save the kingdom, your one true love is the first girl you meet in high school - and make them feel earned.
![sequel to the magicians land sequel to the magicians land](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/gQ8AAOSwqTxhXyXs/s-l640.jpg)
![sequel to the magicians land sequel to the magicians land](https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/themagicians/images/b/b9/The_Neitherlands.jpg)
Sequel to the magicians land how to#
The way each character answers the question of how to live so distinctly is a reminder that there are many paths, and the scene in the library, in which each character is shown the book of his or her life and advised not to look at the pages, is a reminder that in the end we can’t turn to a book as if it were a walkthrough. Janet is not Poppy, and I am not Alice or Julia or Quentin even when I wish I were. The Magician’s Land takes us to the Neitherland libraries and shows us that each of us have our own story. If there’s a question about adulthood that needs to be answered, there’s a character in the Magicians books who is trying to answer it.
![sequel to the magicians land sequel to the magicians land](https://brooklynbased.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Image-1.jpg)
Sequel to the magicians land series#
(The difference between Quentin’s adolescent and adult response to the question what does it mean to love and be loved? is enough to make the entire series worth reading.) I kept Julia as my mental model the entire time I was hustling my way into a career. Quentin and I, for example, are both learning the first steps of adult relationships at the same time. We’ve grown up together, and are now seeing each other into full-fledged adulthood. The Magicians are a bit more special to me, however, because we’re peers. It’s the same reason I re-read Anna Karenina or Little Women or Cryptonomicon. I just want to be around people who are thinking seriously about the same things I am. I’d never make it as a magician I don’t know enough calculus or Old Church Slavonic. Instead, I turn to the Magicians books when I need to read about other people wrestling with the big questions of life and love and humanity. I wore a cardigan, because it might be cold, and I carried the cardboard case that my Mickey Mouse watch came in, in case I needed to protect it.) I went through an entire phase in which I dressed every day as if I needed to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. (I did fantasize about traveling to Narnia when I was a kid. When I write that the Magicians are my Fillory, I don’t mean that I literally dream about entering the urban fantasy world that Grossman has created the way that his characters dream about traveling to Fillory, the Narnian analogue of their childhoods. It hits it in the face, and takes the punch, simultaneously. We’ll leave the argument about whether The Magicians trilogy is “great literature” for the commenters to sort out, and focus on the important part: it does not shy away from this question. I already regret not being able to read that story, three years from now.)Īll great literature has at its core the question of how to live. (Grossman has stated that he probably won’t write another Magicians book, but we all know what the next story is, or should be: the book of whether - and how - to become a parent. Now, with The Magician’s Land, the characters and I are both on the other side of 30, and we have a story about what it means to be an adult. When I read The Magicians, I needed a story about saying goodbye to school and facing what appeared to be the anticlimax of “real life.” When I read The Magician King, I was ready for a story about people who stopped waiting for things to happen to them and started getting down to work. I use the word “precious” very seriously. Lev Grossman’s Magicians books are precious to me in the same way that the Fillory books are precious to Quentin.