Book Review: The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

This is the third and final book of The Magicians series by Lev Grossman. It has been many years since I read the first two so I didn't remember all the details, just the general gist of things. Still, picking this up after so long was easy enough to do and I don't think I lost much by not remember some of the events of the prior books. I had also recently watched the first season on TV, which I think spans beyond just the first book and helped me remember some of the finer points I had forgotten about.

For my full review, see below. I aim to avoid spoilers for this book, but the other two books may be unavoidable. My readings of the prior books predate my blog, but you can find a brief review of the second book, The Magician King, on Goodreads.

Overall Impression
This was an interesting and fitting conclusion to The Magicians saga. A lot goes on and I felt a bit lost at first since it had been a while since I read the prior books, but after a bit the story flows naturally and I stopped worrying about missing any details. The characters and setting are much the same as before, perhaps improved now that things have matured in this universe.

Plot
The plot follows some time after the events of The Magician King. Quentin is stuck on Earth, but we learn a lot has happened with him in the intervening time. His initial quest is a bit cryptic, but the story takes us a bit to the past so we learn about his motivations. At the same time, we cut to Eliot and Janet in Fillory with their discovery that Fillory is dying. Exactly how and why is something they'll uncover as the story progresses and it will, as one can imagine, intersect with Quentin's story on Earth. The disjointed nature of the story at first can be off-putting, but as you continue reading everything falls together.

Characters
Many of the same characters from prior books appear again, in some form or another. Quentin is still the main focus of the story, with all his involvement in Fillory. Eliot and Janet are still in Fillory, as are Poppy and Josh, who I had forgotten about. Penny makes an appearance as well and we have a new character, Plum, another student of Brakesbill with ties to Fillory. We even get to learn more about what happened to Julia and Alice. One thing I liked about this book is that several of the main characters (though maybe not all of them) feel like they've finally grown up and are a tad more mature. I've never fully connected with the characters in this series, for various reasons, yet this book is brought me closer to them.

Setting / World Building
As before, The Magician's Land takes place on both Earth and Fillory. Fillary, for those new to the series, is an equivalent of Narnia- a magical land told in children's book that actually happens to be real, but really hard to get to. We get to bounce back and forth with them as the story's focus shifts between the various characters. One interesting aspect is that we learn a bit more about the gods Ember and Umber, how Fillory, and other worlds like it, come to exist and how they end. There is a lot of magic we see on both worlds and we even learn a bit more about the Chatwin kids and how they initially got involved with Fillory.

Final Thoughts
If you've been reading the series, I recommend you finish it by reading this book. It wraps up several of the overarching plot lines and brings closure to many character stories. This series is a bit of an odd one for me. Despite classifying it as fantasy in the labels of my blog, it isn't quite that. It has elements of fantasy, but it's more grounded in reality. Yet it's not magic realism in that way either; if anything, it's its opposite: magic without fantasy. This is a book about magic and fantasy for fans of neither, for fans of contemporary fiction that have little to no idea about speculative genre fiction and have no strong interest in pursuing it. It's nevertheless, an interesting and engaging read, but I acknowledge that I may not have been the target audience for it.