Hien Nguyen Nguyen itibaren 9342 Sankt Jakob, Austria
A fair and comprehensive story of a complicated and troubled genius. Author remains nonjudgmental, but lays it all out there.
***a couple of spoilers appear in my rant*** This book read better than the first ("The Magicians") in that it actually had a theme and a followable story. I actually found myself enjoying a great deal of it, up until the ending. Lev, WTF were you thinking!? What kind of phone-it-in crap are you pulling here? Geesh! Poppy: Oh no, I can't possibly stay! I have my work on dragons that I *must* get back to. Josh: I've got a palace in Venice, more money than I can ever spend... Why would I want to walk away from that? ONE JARRING BREAK FROM STORY FLOW DURING THIS STORY'S DEATH RATTLE ***AND TOTALLY OUT OF LEFT FIELD WITH ABSOLUTELY NO SETUP*** Dude, we're not going with you back to Earth! We're going to stay and be Queen/King; we just couldn't say no. WHO THE #$&% ASKED YOU!!! I mean really, no one asked anybody crap! Just all of a sudden we're watching Quentin being given the bum's rush and, when he's consoling himself that at least he'll be able to have two of his friends to be with, they act like they've been planning all along to stay. I very much wanted to throw this POS across the room after reading that. It felt like the gist was "We didn't want to stay here and just be your guests or anything, but since your job's vacant... see ya sucker!" And WTF's up with the "gate keeper" chick? You've kicked the collective cans of everyone that's gotten in your way through the whole book, but one bossy chick and a dude in a tux start acting all uppity and bossing you around and you just take it and roll over? It makes no sense. None whatsoever. As a side note, I did mention that I enjoyed a great deal of this book (and I did). I especially was getting into the parallel back story of Julia. I enjoyed that MUCH more than the rest of the story--especially ANYTHING dealing with that whining prick Quentin. All-in-all, I bought this book in the hopes that it would be better than the first; it was (IMO). However, I've gotten a good feel on Mr. Grossman's writing style now and WILL NEVER buy another of his books. If he were to write another book in this series, I *might* check it out from the library. I won't, however, take any part in monetarily encouraging this author to write again.
His stories are very entertaining and smartly written. There's always an unexpected, yet logical twist at the end.